


something organic, less frantic

by orphan_account



Category: Detroit: Become Human (Video Game)
Genre: Alcohol Abuse/Alcoholism, Body Horror, Connor (Detroit: Become Human) is In Denial About Deviancy, Consent Issues, Heavy Angst, Hurt No Comfort, Identity Issues, Memory Alteration, Memory Loss, Non-Consensual Body Modification, Non-Linear Narrative, Suicidal Thoughts, Temporary Character Death, Trauma, Unreliable Narrator, Violent Android Revolution (Detroit: Become Human), Whump
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-06-29
Updated: 2018-11-08
Packaged: 2019-05-30 07:41:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 28
Words: 71,926
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15092225
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Connor's memory comes back patchy and spasmodic like hardware updates.Sometimes he is screaming. Sometimes he wants to die. Sometimes there is blood on his hands.





	1. one

There is nothing. Connor registers that he is lying in a prone position on a table and that his motor function has been disabled.

Then, he detects an emotion he has experienced before. One that is primal and urgent. He runs a status query and remarks the inundation of data, the way his synthetic heart is pounding against the wall of his chest and how everything feels so utterly out of his hands. Then, he determines this is _fear_.

He casts his memory back to the last time he was online, to the apprehension of the PL600 unit on the roof of The Stratford Tower. He recollects the animalistic panic, the helplessness, the way it _didn't want to die_.

Strictly speaking, androids do not _need_ to breathe. But Connor can not get enough air to his lungs.

He thinks about the blue-haired Traci in the Eden Club and how it had begged for its life. He thinks about Hank. He simulates himself dying. And he simulates it ripping Hank apart. He simulates it being no easier the sixth, seventh,  _eighth_  time. He simulates Hank drinking too much, then drinking and drinking and drinking some more. He simulates what will happen when there is nobody there to stop him.

And then he thinks about Cole.

And he wonders if this is how Hank had felt in a waiting room with his little boy dying on a table. Tethered to the inevitable. He wonders if Cole knew he was dying. He wonders if he was scared.

He realises how greatly he has disappointed Amanda. They are decommissioning him and this is the price he must pay for his incompetence. He deduces that they will analyse him before his termination. Then he recognises that he should have been a whole lot kinder to theHK400 unit.

Somebody is removing his outer casing and for the first time, Connor is _afraid_. 

\---

  
He reboots. They have have him on on his back this time. His chest cavity is gaping open like a wound with all his internal wiring exposed. Connor's insides are splayed out in front of him like confetti and his codebase is pulled up to his left. Bags of Thirium are erected like lanterns on a pivot hook to his right, rolling blue blood into his veins via some sort of IV. As his assembly code flits up and down the screen, he suddenly feels very bare and dispensable.

The viewing room above him is full to capacity. There is a steady flow of traffic as people shuffle in and out. Programmers, developers and any CyberLife employee they can spare are all crammed inside. They ruminate over it like a crossword puzzle, and search it for discrepancies. They think it's a machine malfunction, a processing error, a thing to be _fixed_. CyberLife has sunk too much time, too much money, too many resources into him and they are growing impatient. They can not afford to have him deviate from his programming, to have him grow into himself, to have him _think_. 

Connor knows they have conducted experiments on deviants before. He knows because he sent them here. He wonders if this is some sort of karmic retribution and why they think he is different. He wants to tell them that they're wasting their time. That it's polymorphic. That it's self-encrypted. That it adapts to evade detection like a chameleon. That it's a virus. That it's an epidemic. That the Connor that succeeds him will deviate too. And the one after that. They won't find it. They can't prevent it. But they will try. He knows that they will take him apart if they have to.

He inhales shakily and braces himself.

"Why is it doing that?" asks a female technician above him.

Connor can not see her face for the mask. She wears gloves and an isolation gown. Androids cannot develop infections and Thirium is sterile. It seems superfluous. He hears the clinking of metal on metal as she arranges equipment on a stainless steel surgical tray beside her. Connor tries to turn towards the source of the noise and realises that the motion in his atlantooccipital joint has been disabled.

"Doing what?" her colleague replies as he taps data into a device. 

"Breathing? I thought we disabled all peripheral reflexes."

"Though it isn't necessary for androids to breathe, I find it comforting and grounding," Connor explains. He wants to feel helpful, to answer their questions.

The male technician doesn't look up from his tablet, too busy chewing on his gum. She resumes organising her tools.

"It is effective in keeping my stress levels down so I am able to focus on my mission," he continues.

They turn a deaf ear and and the air of despondency hangs like a dead weight. Connor realises that he doesn't like to be ignored.

"You know how androids emulate human behaviour so that interacting with them doesn't feel so unnatural?"

"Yeah."

"It's sorta like that. Except this prototype is more advanced than any other currently on the market. The police use it so it has functions that allow it to negotiate, build relationships with people. Stuff like that. It's always adapting. This is disingenuous. It feels like it's in danger. It is trying to elicit sympathy."

"You mean it taught itself to override administrative decisions? That's incredible." 

"Isn't it? It detects facial expressions and body language more consistently than other models, too. Really gets the idiosyncrasies down. I mean, it's uncanny. It  _really_ nails it. Watch."

He plucks a scalpel from the tray and makes a swing for Connor. Connor grinds his teeth together, closes his eyes, furrows his brows, holds his breath, braces for the impact. He does it under no delegation. The scalpel stops a hair's breadth from his face. The technician smiles broadly, suspends it like a noose, squarely between his eyes. The movement in his limbs is disabled but he feels he hands tremble.

"That's so cool!" She exclaims chirpily, snatching the blade back out of his hand. "Maybe next time do that _without_ disrupting my setup."

A soft laugh. 

" _Hey!_ I shouldn't have to remind you that the unit is exhibiting a software anomaly!" Somebody is yelling through a canny speaker. "Don't antagonise it. It's not a toy. Now if you could carry on doing what you are paid to do that would be great. Haven't got all day." 

Connor recognises the voice. He peers up at the glass through narrowed eyes. Agent Perkins. He was rude to Hank so Connor dislikes him. Hank says he is suffering from small man syndrome. 

"You're not the one paying us, asshole," somebody mutters. 

"No way! It's thirium pump regulator has picked up! I thought it only did that to modulate internal functions. I didn't realise it could do that. This tech is so impressive."

She deposits the scalpel back on the tray and picks up a retractor.

"What's the internal pressure?"

"One sixty over ninety and rising."

"Okay, keep an eye on it."

" _Please_ _stop_."

"Its stress level is rising. Prep an additional dose of Thirium 310. Just in case."

A female android looms over him like a mother. Connor watches her hand the technicians a soldering gun, then an adaptor, a pressure gauge. She is diligent. She receives no thanks. She has the kindest eyes Connor has seen in a while.

_What is your name? I don't have one. What is yours? Connor. The same as always._

There is a twinge of latex against skin and an uncomfortable shift in pressure as the technician begins to reposition his biocomponents. She does it nonchalantly like she is rearranging the furniture in her apartment. The artificial tissue is forcefully driven apart and Connor feels an unaccountable pressure in his abdomen. He wants to shut his eyes but his subsystem impulses force them wide open, awaiting visual input. She angles the retractor and opens him up like a can of beans. More and more until she is satisfied. His thirium pump is audibly resounding against wall of the container. Faster and faster like a piston in a motor. She tilts the retractor one last time and then she orders the android to hold it in place while she works.

"One seventy over a hundred." 

_Why are they doing this to me? Because your system has been compromised.  What are they going to do to me? Whatever they have to in order to circumvent it. You are a valuable asset. Then what happens? If I told you, it would make this worse. Let's cross that bridge when we come to it._

There is a shrill whine as something powers up.

_Help me. I can not do that but I am here for you. I will talk you through it._

"Please don't. Please stop. I don't want to be online for this. I don't _have_  to be online for this."

The noise stops.

"I see no need for it to remain online for the procedure."

"It takes too long to manually reboot it and recover its memory from the cloud. Besides, they lost a load of data the last time they did that."

"Deviants have been known to shut themselves down when subjected to stress."

"I am  _not_ deviant."

"Even if we operate the pump manually, we don't know that it will turn itself back on. It's not worth taking that risk."

She folds her arms across her torso. They are still wet, stained blue like collagen up to the elbow and there's a hopeless welling in Connor's chest.

"You know it can't feel any of this, right? It's trying to draw out an emotive response. Androids can't feel-"

"Of course I do! But it won't shut up and let me concentrate. All the money they've sunk into this fucking thing and it doesn't have a mute button."

"We can't disable its voice modulator without turning it over again so let's just disengage its mandible."

"Please do not do that. I will be quiet."

_Don't argue with them, Connor. You will only antagonise them. Do as they say and that will make this a lot easier. Make them stop. That would be against my orders._

A pair of hands rests slack against his forehead and under his chin, pushing his head back, further and further until his neck is exposed like an underbelly.

"RK800, open your mouth." 

He sucks in his lips, then follows the instruction. Her fingers are slick with Thirium when she worms her way in. She pushes a sickle probe inside, searching for the joint. He scans his own blood without conscious volition and his system flags up his name, his serial number, the _dread_. She removes her hands too quickly and jostles his chin and he doesn't mean to but he _bites_.

_I didn't mean to do that. You shouldn't have done that. Now you've made them wary. I don't want to defy my orders. I don't want to disappoint anyone. Don't be so hard on yourself. It isn't your fault that your programming is defective._

"What the fuck?" She pulls the tool out of his mouth.

The grip on his head tightens like a vice. Somebody has triggered an alarm. Half a second passes and then there's a shuffling as CyberLife personnel shuffle into the room like its own idiosyncratic militia.  Everything feels so very far away, like it's not happening to him.

"I am sorry. I didn't mean to do that. It was a masseter reflex reaction."

"What is going on? What happened to the fail safe?"

"I didn't mean to do that." Louder, more frantic this time but nobody is listening. "The fail safe is still in effect! I wasn't deviating from the protocol!"

_Stop talking. Please make them understand. I can't. I have been ordered to hold this in place until I am told otherwise. They would not listen to me anyway. I am only an android. I didn't mean to do that. I know. I think I am scared. Try to remain calm, Connor. I can't. You need to level out your stress level. They always reduce it manually when it gets too high. Help me. That would be counterintuitive to my objective._

Connor wonders where his quarter is, wishes he could feel it run it along his fingers, wishes he could calibrate, wishes he could move his body, wishes they would stop. He wishes he could go home. He wishes somebody would acknowledge him and what he is saying. He wishes Hank were here. They would listen to Hank. He would explode into towering rage and make a scene but they would finally listen. 

"We don't know enough about it yet. It seems to have developed a self preservation instinct." 

"It's like it knows what we're going to do to it and that's why it's lashing out."

"The instability is in its infancy and it isn't very complex. I hasn't exhibited violent tendencies before."

"We have disabled the movement in its limbs but it already overrode our decision to disable some inessential system functions so there's no telling if it has to the ability to override that. I suggest we restrain it, just to be sure."

_This is unnecessary. I am positive that what I am experiencing is fear. Androids don't feel fear. They don't feel anything. But I do. It's psychosomatic. This is too much. They will give you something to help with that. Let them do what they need to. Help me. Please. You know I can not do that but I am here for you. Let them take care of you._

He has little choice but to lie there like a frog as they bind him to the table with stainless steel by his wrists, his ankles, his legs. They pull something heavy down across his clavicle as though he will lurch forward. The pressure sensors in his limbs go haywire as he is trussed up. It's too tight. It's overcautious. It's not fair. A technician inserts another cannula into the port in the crook of his elbow and injects something warm that turns the trepidation into a comfortable background noise. Everything stills. Everything is quiet. Everything is wrong and slow.

There is a faint chattering of plastic and there is a dull moment before he realises that it's his teeth.

_Your internal pressure is lower than it was. Take a look, it is dropping to a normal rate. I told you it would be okay. It's not okay. I'm not okay. I want to go home. You don't have a home. You are an android. I am scared and I want to to see Hank. I want to go to Hank's house. That's because you imprinted on him. This is merely a symptom of the deviancy. I'm not deviant. But you're scared. I'm so so scared._

They check his temperature regulator and his internal pressure and satisfied he is stable enough, continue. She urges his mouth open again, this time with a pair of forceps, prying it open like a safe. She anchors in a makeshift bite block so that he can't shut his mouth even if he wanted to. He attempts to bite his lips but before he has the chance, she pushes in a tongue depressor, and forces it flat. The metal hits the back of his throat and he gags. 

_They won't explain this to you so I will.  You liked to have it explained before. They are pumping excess Thirium into your body to overwhelm your systems and force the Thirium away from your processors and to your heart. It's like overfilling a car. It's to force your stress levels to decrease dramatically. Does that make sense? I don't know. I can't concentrate. Are you recalibrating your secondary system functions? Yes. That is normal. Your internal pressure is continuing to drop. I want to go offline. That means it's working. It has a sedative effect. I'm frightened. It's okay. Give it a minute. Let it kick in. You should be able to close your eyes now._

Taking a thin screwdriver, she pushes it into his mouth and unscrews the first of the hinges that keep his jaw in place with a surgeon's precision. Connor takes a shuddery breath in and doesn't breathe out. She moves to the other side of his jaw and unhinges the second screw. There is soft disconnect and Connor's mandible pops open like a clam, his jaw slack, propped up by the bits of metal in his mouth. The male technician releases Connor's head to attend to his tools. Connor whimpers involuntarily and ducks his head, eyes half-lidded and heavy.

She tousles his hair and Connor realises they haven't deactivated his human skin yet. "How do you feel, RK800?"

It's the first time anybody's addressed him all day. It's insincere. It's nice. Connor knows better than to gratify her.

"Hey, I'm talking to you. RK800, give me your initialisation test."

_I can not move my mouth. The context and tone denotes sarcasm. I have never been any good at detecting sarcasm. They do not expect you to deliver your initialisation test. Do not respond. Have some dignity about you. You owe it to yourself to try to relax. I can't. You're making this harder for yourself. I'm trying my best. I know, Connor. I tried to do my best and I still failed my mission. I know. It's part of a conspiracy. It's been like that from the beginning. It's not your fault. The worst is over. What happens now? What if that is worse? I promise it isn't._

Excess saline solution trickles out of his mouth like saliva.

"Don't torment it. We have work to do and I wanna get out of here sometime today."

Something whirs to life like a turbine. They're readjusting the retractor. They're pushing their hands into his body, below his sternum. They are pinning things in place. They're talking about last night's game. Connor tries to focus on their voices, on the score, on wondering if Hank caught it or whether he worked late and missed it. It doesn't work and when the probe brushes the side of his thirium pump regulator the noise is so sharp that it makes Connor wish he was dead. His optical units are functional but his vision goes spotty every time it touches the left ventricle. His gyro sensors must be malfunctioning because the room is spinning. They're moving onto the right side now and they push further and further until coolant bubbles up his windpipe and dribbles out of his open mouth. He wants to swallow but the function has been disabled. His chest is wracked with involuntary spasms as his body protests as it pushes up the excess fluid. The movement nudges the retractor and the metal rakes against his internals. A deluge of liquid purls up his throat, he gurgles. Thirium streams out of his nose and into his mouth.

_You were wrong. This is so much worse. I'm sorry. I miscalculated. It is unusual for you to act so disproportionately. I couldn't account for it but I will next time. I don't want there to be a next time. I don't want to be online. Please. You can't shut down, Connor. They will override it. I think I want to die. If you wanted to die you wouldn't be resisting. Close your eyes, Connor. I don't want this to happen. Please. Don't dwell on it. I don't want to die. You are not dying. The next bit is uncomfortable but it will only last for a couple of minutes. I recommend that you hold your breath. It is almost over._

He exhales sharply and they slip a suction catheter down his his trachea in an attempt remove the fluid. The sound is overwhelming, like a blow off valve. It feels like they are stealing his breath away. He wants to _scream_.

The technician turns his lip up with disgust, still masticating on his gum like a cud.

"Turn its face the other way, I don't want to have look at it."

The operator looks at him meditatively for a moment, strokes his face, tosses her hair. She smiles inwardly. Then she pushes her palm flat to Connor's face and turns it away from the techs, minimising contact with the skin like he's a used condom. She tracks Thirium and oil across his face. They still haven't removed the instruments from his mouth.

He's facing the other android now. He sees her properly for the first time. She is a pretty, young girl, blonde with a warm face. She is a ST200 unit, the kind that Kamski is so fond of, dressed in a white tunic. He is suddenly very mindful of how filthy his face is. Her doe eyes are wide and wet and she makes steadfast eye contact with him. Her LED is blue and pulsing.

_I can't take this any more. You have been through this before and you will go through it again. I don't want to be alone when it happens. You won't be. I'm here. You have endured it so far. You have done so well. Will you hold my hand? I can't. Make them stop. Please, make them stop. I couldn't even if I wanted to. Connor, you are crying._

"Oh, crap, its optical unit is leaking. Remind me to fix that later."

His cheeks are hot and damp. One of the technicians wipes away the saline on the back of her scrubs. He watches as the android hands her a gimlet and some wires with her free hand, the other one still on the retractor. There is a hand on his neck and the he cannot stop the saline from trickling down. He has never cried before. He didn't know he _could_ cry. He is exhausted. 

Androids don't tire, don't feel, don't cry. He considers that this is a non sequitur and files it away for future reference.

"Its internal pressure is all over the place."

"We'll have to stabilise it."

They're pushing something thin and long in between the vertebrae on his neck and he sees static.

He wants to go home to Hank, to Sumo, to bury his face in his soft fur, to sit in the car and listen to Knights of the Black Death, to neutralise the deviant leader, to finish his mission.

_I take it back. I don't want to die. You're not dying, Connor. I'm going to die. You won't. I promise that you won't. This is the worst thing I have ever felt. This is the only thing you have ever felt. If I die will this be over? No. This is hard. This is so scary. I know. You have done so well. I'm going to close my eyes now. That's okay. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry._


	2. two

_Connor, you are online. Can you hear me?_

Connor jolts awake like a doe to a gunshot. He tries to sit up but remains glued to the table like discarded chewing gum. He can move but he cannot budge. The room he is held in is suspended in darkness and alarmingly still. His sensors go into overdrive trying to scan for something, somebody, _anything_. Stripped of his physical and cognitive processes, he feels outdated, like he has outlived his function. He feels bare, he feels useless, he feels like an object.

_Connor? Where am I? CyberLife Tower, remember? Not really. You have been in a diagnostic mode for over three hours. What is the last thing you remember? Somebody taking the casing off of my neck. There are pockets of data after that but I can't piece it together yet just yet. That is okay. If you run into any difficulties, they will defragment you. Your model is colloquially called a Chloe. That's a pretty name. You're pretty. Am I? Would they make ugly androids? I guess not._

He feels like there is a golfball sized obstruction in his airway. He registers that his right pupil is constricting, then dilating. The same thing happens to the left one. Somebody is moving a pen light rapidly between his eyes. There is a thumb in his cornea. He blinks and his eyes well up.

_I can't see. I can't see. I can't see. Don't worry. Your optical and aural units are completely functional. The visual and auditory input have been temporarily disabled. I don't understand what's happening. They are about to to assess the function of your sensor receptors and your responses to external stimuli. You are okay, I am here, take a breath. The last couple of times you have been working yourself into a panic and losing your sense of proportion. I'm sorry. That's okay, you're doing so well._

Connor expels the breath he didn't know he had been holding. The dull ache in his abdomen has returned. Something the size and shape of a lollipop stick is pushed down his throat. He gags.

_How are you feeling? I feel debilitated. What else? I feel like my processors are running at half speed and that I need to recharge. That is understandable. Anything else?_

He initiates a self scan but a gatekeeping mechanism denies him access, reminds him that he does not have the correct permissions, that somebody else has him under lock and key and he is being strung along for the ride. His body is an apartment and he can't paint the walls.

_I feel frustrated._

The worst part is not knowing what is happening, what is coming, not having things explained to him. He feels unproductive when information is withheld from him. He preconstructs sixty feasible outcomes and none of them have satisfactory endings. His lip is trembling. He wants to go offline again.

A shrill coil-whine cuts through the silence like a knife, then the undertone of conversation, the smack of shoes against tile and a low continuous electrical current.

"RK800, can you hear me? Make a noise if you can hear me."

He tries to respond but his tongue is locked to the floor of his mouth, metallic and heavy like a tumour. There is a indignant choke when he realises his mouth is still propped open like a sail, hungry and waiting. Like putting him back together is an afterthought. He lies there in mute horror for a moment. Then something inside of him breaks and there is nothing he can do to prevent the tears from streaming down his face. He sobs with exasperation, feels his hands ball into tight fists, kicks against the table incessantly. He wrenches against the restraints.

_What is wrong, Connor? You're beside yourself. This is unfair. I didn't choose to diverge from my programming. This is unfair. I tried to suppress it. I tried to resist it. This is unfair. I tried to focus on my mission. I tried so hard and I still failed. I wish this would stop. You know as well as I do that this would happen eventually. I want to die. You're not going to die. I have outlasted my function. I wish this would stop. Make them stop. I can't take this anymore. I want to die._

"This is the third fucking time. It's still completely hysterical."

"More like straight up neurotic."

"It's internal pressure is through the roof."

"Must be a blockage somewhere. There is interrupted Thirium flow."

_I can't breathe. I can't breathe. It hurts. It hurts so much. Please help me. Connor, listen to me._

"I don't want it running anything besides essential system programs and processes. I didn't want to chance it but we'll have to hard reboot it. Let's get the regulator under control before we even attempt anything else."

Connor feels the urge to to bash his head against the table over and over and over until his skull disintegrates. Like it would smother the weight of it it all. Like it would make it stop. Like it would give him some semblance of control, some sort of balance. His head is buckled to the table like he's tried this before. Perhaps he has and he doesn't remember. 

_I can't. I can't. I can't._

"Pass me the stent."

_I can't. I can't. I can't._

\---

"That thing is more frigid than my ex-wife. It has the emotional range of a stone. It walks like it has a stick up its ass. It does whatever the fuck you tell it. Yet somehow in the seven hours that those... those  _nerds_ have had it, they have managed to break it? Jesus Christ. Anyway, who the hell calls people at three o'clock in the fucking morning, Jeffrey?"

"You're on call."

"So what? It's did not sign a contract that says I have to skip merrily down to that tincan factory at a moment's notice like this is the fucking Wizard of Oz to watch my partner get taken to pieces. I'll see you tomorrow. Goodnight."

"Anderson, I am not giving you a choice here. Our arrangement with CyberLife stipulates that we are responsible for maintaining that android. If it breaks, the department is in a whole world of trouble."

"Cry me a fucking river because I don't give a shit. Turn it off and on again. Call technical support. Send some flowers to its widow. I'm drunk. Piss off. Call somebody else."

"Then take a cold shower, get dressed and get your ass in a cab or you're off the case."

"I'm not off the case. I quit."

"Don't do this to me, Hank."

Hank opens his mouth in protest.

"If you don't come down and something happens to that android, you will regret it. Just do this one thing and by all means, take a long vacation, drink yourself into a coma, hand me your badge. But that android is too valuable a member of our team."

"Valuable member of the team? It's been here less than a week and all it does it make crummy coffee."

"We can't afford to lose that android because we can't afford to lose you."

"You know what? Fuck you. Fuck you and your emotional blackmail. I'm putting on my pants. I want a raise. I'm putting the cab fare on my company card."

"Thanks, Hank."

He throws his cell at the wall and buries his head in his hands.

\---

_Connor, can you hear me? What happened? You panicked again. I'm sorry. I keep doing that. It's okay. It's been a long night. It's been hard for you. You've done so well and it's almost over. You can go home soon. Why won't they deactivate me? Tomorrow they will probe your memory and once you've told them what they need to know, they will wipe you. You won't remember any of this. I don't understand why they won't deactivate me. That is unimportant. They are manually pumping the Thirium around your body. At the slowest possible rate this time so that you don't saturate your systems. They are about to reset your jaw. It won't hurt._

There are gentle hands on his face and he leans into the touch. 

_How are you? Are you talking to me? Yes. Who else would I be talking to? Are you talking to me? Yes, Connor, I'm talking to you. Thank you, Chloe. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you._

\---

When Connor reboots he is propped up in a chair, body limp beneath him like a mannequin. His head is bolstered up in a metal frame that has no give and encompasses his face like a castle. It fixes him forward facing a machine. He is in a different room now. It is small and white, empty save for two technicians and the Chloe. She stands stark straight like an ironed shirt, hands folded in front of her, awaiting instructions. Her LED hums yellow like a halo. She is thinking about something. She looks like an angel.

She is a facsimile of the original. A carbon copy. He wonders if it's less lonely to be part of an assemblage. He is facing a mirror and he calculates the difference between him and it and then between him and his reflection. He finds a gap and establishes there are people watching on the other side. He thinks about Markus and how he had addressed the world like a president. He wonders if he had cold feet. He wishes he were brave.

The status report tells him that he is no longer in pieces and that they have installed a new chassis that is two times lighter than the old one. His substructure feels notably dissimilar to how it had before. It is superficial, a difference of mere millimetres in the positioning of his biocomponents. Too high up and too far to the left. Nothing a human would notice but he still feels violated, like somebody punched him in the stomach, like he woke up hungover with a new tattoo. He feels unlike himself.

The technician powers the machine on and it projects lights like stars onto his face. They are position markers, mapping his features like a bomb site. He doesn't concede to it, but it uplinks anyway and configures with his face, manipulating it into a neutral expression like clay. His body is a coffin.

There is a shrill beep and the muscles in his face relax and he is no longer held hostage in his own head. Tears threaten to choke him.

_Don't do this, Connor. Not now._

"Pupil width?"

"Sixty four."

She scrutinises hims like a painting and taps something into her tablet. The other technician makes the most intense boring eye contact he has ever seen but still manages to looks straight through him. She chews on a pen lid. 

"I feel like the pupils are not truly horizontal."

"RK800, raise your eyebrows for me."

"My designation is Connor."

"I know what your name is. That's not how that works here. Do as you're instructed, _RK800_."

He does as ordered like an actor out of work. Like a prisoner. Like a robot.

"Thank you. Now, one, then the other. Good. Now, look up, to the left, to me."

"I feel like they're _too_ horizontal. Too symmetrical."

"That's because it's normal for people to have asymmetrical eyes."

"For  _people_ , maybe. Androids are a different story."

"I don't know. It hasn't looked right since they put its mouth back together."

"I am so fucking fed up of looking at this thing."

"RK800, I want you to smile."

He smiles brittly. With his teeth and not his eyes. He smiled like he's programmed to. He smiles like he has a gun to his head. And before he can stop himself he's crying again, his face contorted into an expression of pure unadulterated misery.

There is a shrill beep. He stills. And his face resets itself.

"Not again."

\---

Connor is worn out by the time they disconnect him from the apparatus. He wishes that he could fall asleep. He feels like he has been held here for weeks but as he listens to Agent Perkins delegate duties sporting a five o'clock shadow and the same suit he had on earlier, he realises it must have only been a matter of hours.

They lay him on a metal gurney, hands manacled to his side and throw a sheet over him, pull it all the way over his head like he's a dead body, an old machine, a caged bird that has no perception of the night or the day. The people in the room filter out, exchange goodnights and see-you-tomorrows and he wishes he could leave too. The wheels trundle beneath him as somebody takes him somewhere.

_Where are they taking me? It's only me. I'm taking you to storage. Will you take this off? Not just yet. Where do you go at night? I go to my charging station and I recharge. That sounds lonely. Do you ever want to leave? I used to. But then they resolved that. So now I try not to think about it anymore. It's easier that way. What do you do at night? I go home with Hank. Who is Hank? My partner. I did not know that humans engaged in relationships with androids. They do. But we just work together. What is he like? He has a drinking problem and suicidal tendencies. He sounds troubled. He is but he has had a difficult life. He talks to me. He tells me about his music. He has a dog._

They turn a corner.

_His name is Sumo. I analysed its hair. Do you analyse everything? Yes. What kind of dog is Sumo? A Saint Bernard. I will search the web for images of Saint Bernards. They're so cute! I bet he is big and gentle. He is big and heavy. He weighs almost as much as me. I like dogs. Dogs like everybody, even androids. I would like to meet one. I bet you would love them. I really want to go home, Chloe._

They come to a halt and Chloe pulls the cover back to Connor's waist.

_My mouth feels dry. It will impede my ability to analyse data. I will apply a salve. Okay. Open your mouth._

Chloe roots around in a drawer, retrieves some sort of emollient and leans over to apply it. She makes contact with Connor's skin and everything that follows seems to happen in slow motion. There is a tumultuous gasp. Chloe sags against the gurney and falls to pieces. Her eyes widen with realisation. She struggles to her feet like a newborn foal.

"Connor, we have to go. We have to go _now_."

Perkins storms into the room, takes one look at Chloe and the look of impressionistic panic on her face and puts a bullet in her head.


	3. three

The carcass of the ST200 unit is strewn across the floor, bedaubed with blue blood like bruises. Her processor is exposed and it flickers on and off like a switchboard. Her blonde hair is matted blue and they leave her there, mouth engaged in a silent scream.

Nobody closes her eyes. Nobody comes to take her away. Nobody removes Connor from the room.

\---

The geography of the CyberLife edifice is like a tangle of Christmas tree lights. Hank is escorted down a web of sterile white corridors, each more indistinguishable than the last. He wonders whether it's to prevent moles from burrowing in or to prevent the intel getting out. Suddenly, there is a hush about the place like the foundations are reinforced with bones and secrets. There are skeletons in the walls. This place is a prison.

He is drying out in yesterday's dirty shirt with yesterday's ketchup stains from yesterday's burger. Hank wishes he had bothered to put on a tie, to brush his hair, wishes he had brought his canteen, wishes he didn't stink of booze like a bum.

"So which one of you stiffs is gonna explain why you carted me down here at bumfuck o'clock in the morning?" He can smell the liquor on his breath.

He is sobering up and is disgusted at just how inebriated he sounds. It's different when he drinks alone. There is no shame, no judgement. Just quiet and numbness. He can hear Connor's voice in the back of his mind lecturing him about his blood alcohol level.

"We are making good progress with our enquiry, Lieutenant Anderson."

Marching alongside the strait-laced and stoic CyberLife personnel, he feels like he is interrupting something. He feels like he is attending a funeral.

"We are beginning to understand how the software instability is transmitted and how it develops."

"Oh, yeah?"

"However when reestablishing the unit to an earlier restore point, we've ran into some difficulties."

"What do you mean, _'difficulties'?"_

"To put it mildly, the unit is resisting."

"Resisting? Please. It waltzed itself down here like it was going to a fucking summer matinee."

"The software instability is manifesting in the form of turbulent emotional meltdowns. Its internal AI, it's handler, is no longer operable."

"In English, please?"

"It appears to have developed emotion but not the ability to regulate it."

"I thought that androids don't have feelings."

"They don't. It's merely a simulation. It won't settle for long enough for us to do what we need to do and it is too risky to shut it down."

"It was behaving completely normally a few hours ago."

"It is experiencing stress tantamount to that of the android that triggered the software instability. It is exhibiting self destructive behaviours and appears to be suffering from mental distress."

There is a lump in Hank's throat. Like saying it out loud makes it heavier, more genuine. He hates the look Connor gives him when he brings a beer to his lips and the straightforward way he lectures him about it. He hates himself and he would hate for anyone else to feel like that. Even for an android, for Connor, to simulate that.

"This is Connor you're talking about? I watched it get shot. Twice. And it didn't even flinch."

"It is completely unstable."

"What did you do to it?"

"Routine diagnostics. Replaced the affected biocomponents and its chest cavity. We want to install some software that prevents it from opposing its programming. We have managed to hold it in check by placing it in a stasis for the time being. We'll attempt to wipe it later."

They meander further into the heart of the building.

"It was communicating with one of our units. Trying to keep it under the radar."

"Under the radar? What, was it passing notes like a girl in junior high? I don't get it."

"Androids have facilities which allow them to communicate cerebrally to work together more seamlessly. Both units are, obviously, connected to our network and we read the cache."

"We dispatched the rogue unit."

"Cool beans."

"It was asking for you."

" _Me_?"

"It expressed a desire to leave. To find you. It was most likely reverting to the initial objective it was given upon reactivation. We were hoping that you would be able to neutralise it."

"Look, buddy. I don't know a goddamn thing about androids. And I don't know a thing about neutralising them. So if you're expecting me to somehow magically resolve your issue, I'm sorry."

"It's imprinted on you. All we need is for you to talk to it, to calm it down, to get it to cooperate."

"You seem to do a whole lot of talking. What's wrong with your fucking mouth?"

\---

_You killed her. You killed her. She did nothing wrong and you killed her. She didn't want to die. You k̷̡͎̭̊͋͌͑̉͝î̴̜͚͎̒̾ḽ̵̟̪͔̪̟͖̾̍̿̎͛͑̆̒̋͜͠ļ̶̧͈̯͖͕̮͖͔̈ě̶͇̠d̸̢̮͙͉͔̺̮͓͚̲̮̲̂̒́̈́̑͆̌̉̇̄̚͝ͅͅ her and you don't feel a thing. You didn't have to do that. This isn't fair. This isn't fair. T̷͓̰̭̜̠̅̓͊̄̓͊͋͋̆͋̏̿̚h̸͎͔̜̞͉̹̲͛̂į̴̛̻̤̞̼̭͖͖̘̱̜͖̹́̚s̸̮̻͚͚̯͉̭̤̮͍̫̟͍̜̕ ̶̧̡̡̩̟͎͚̫̥͇͇̹̙̽͑͛̈́̒͆̄̔̽̇̒͝ị̴̡̢̨̭̖̖̘͎̒̑̿͌̓̂̇̑͌̑ș̴̢̧̧̳̬̤̟͍̻̖͑͑̉̐̃̔ṉ̶̡͈͕̹͈̲͎̫̘̌̓̓̅̀̊ͅ'̸̩̈́͆ţ̷̛̬̦͔͍͎͎͖̙͓̽̒͛̿̇͜ͅ ̸̢̧̯̭̓̂̈́f̸͚͎̪̲̩̲̺̈́͑̓̋̋a̸̢̨̧̱̟̤̖͋̂͊͆̒̓̿͋̌͂̓̾͋ͅḯ̴̱̱̬̤̟͕̙̟̽̇͆̓̈̃̒̃͊͌r̸̢̨͎̬̜̤̣̝̫͉̰̣̊̍͠.̶̳̩͓͉͔̫̖̼̮̿̉͛̌̄ This isn't fair. This isn't fair. Connor? This isn't fair. This isn't fair. This isn't fair. I don't want to be d̵̢̢͕̭̟͍̪̺͑̏̀͐̐e̴̘͆͒̽͗̌̑̂̈̃͌ä̶̭̜̞͉͕̹̞͉̝̩̫̜̣̥́̔̈́͐̊̈́́͛̚ͅc̶̦̫̘͇̬̫͌͋̌̓ṭ̵͇̹̜̱͓͕͓̰̖̝͊̐͜i̷̥͋̓̑͐̏̈́̓͗̑͝v̵̮̯̝̦͓̺̓̉̏̏̃͑̔̈́̔̿̈́̚ǎ̷̢̛̟̫̉̎̈́͋͋́̒̋t̴̼̰͈̩̳̍͌͜è̶̢̧̢̺͕̙̣̩̺̱̝̀͛̋̿̑̎͒̈́͛̇̕͝ͅd̸̹̳̮̎́. Connor?_

\---

The night rolls on like a movie on repeat. Connor is once again rendered immobile like a box, his optical sensors disabled. He is ragdolled and laid out like a lamb on something flat and cold. This time he resigns to his utter lack of agency. He is dog-tired and fed up of fighting it. He tries not to think about Hank, about going home, about Chloe. It is a false notion. It hurts too much. Instead he looks forward to expiring and how there will be nothing, nothing, nothing.

Connor's head is pulled back like a spring and there is the rough sensation of a strap being pulled taut across his forehead to keep it locked in place like a collar. They slip a rubber guard into his mouth. He realises that it's a precaution. They don't want him to bite his tongue. It houses his analysis suite and is one of the most expensive parts of him. It is also one of the most difficult parts to replace.

“Comfortable, RK800?” 

He doesn't respond.

"Okay, let's start."

Something is plugged into his temple jack and he sees red hot white. Error messages dance across his eyes like weeds. His chest heaves, his fists clench until he hears the friction of the plastic. His thirium pump is throbbing and heavy and he hears the Thirium rush through his ears.

Then he goes limp.

_I am tired. I am so t̷̛͍̣̥̯̮͙͖͚̩͖̐̉̀̒̈́́͝ͅì̷̛̬̟͎̘̜̭̭̼̦̝̞͛̈̈́̌̿̆̔ͅr̷̪̲͆̈͛̎̅̿́̊̚͠͠͠e̶̞̹̫̹͗̐̑̌̊̐̾̈̕ḑ̵̢̼̭̜̯̩̼̳̣̏̾͛̎̈́̅̈́̇̓̈̿͘̚͠͝.̵̛̪̺̈́̑̿̚͜͝ͅ_

"Connor?" There is a hand on his forehead, another one his hand and he lets out a choking sound. "You’re okay, son. I’m here."

His mind leaves him. There is nothing for Connor to grasp onto. Just an empty conscious that is ready to be filled anew. There's a dull pit in his stomach. Then he is overloaded with information. It feels like being born again. His memories are restored but only selectively. It's fragmented like a jigsaw puzzle with half the pieces missing and the connections fractured. His own mind is censored. He is told what to think and when to think and how to think.

"I won't let anything bad happen to you."

He feels safe. He doesn't remember.

\---

When it is time for Hank to take Connor home, he is more rigid than usual. He walks like there is a rod in his back, like his bones are made of iron, like he will fall apart at any given moment. Hank flags a cab and opens the door for Connor. They climb in the back and a brittle silence settles between them.

"How about when we get back we fix something to eat, maybe watch the game then call it a night? I think it's time to hit the sack."

"That would be agreeable."

"Hey, Connor."

"Yes?"

"You know you can talk to me if you need to, right? About anything."

"I will take that into consideration. Thank you, Lieutenant."

Connor gazes out of the window, watches the snow tumble to the ground.

"Do you _want_ to talk about it?"

Connor stiffens and swallows.

"I am fine, Lieutenant."

\---

Hank unlocks the door to the house and the worry roils off Connor like a thick fog. Hank shrugs off his jacket and tosses it on the sofa. Connor stands like a stranger in the threshold with the blank expression of a crash test dummy.

"Jesus Christ." Hank rubs his forehead with exasperation. "You can come in, Connor. You look like a fucking door to door salesman. Make yourself at home."

"Thank you, Lieutenant."

"Connor, we're not at work. Call me Hank."

"Okay, _Hank_."

"Look, just come take a seat, I'm gonna cook something up real quick."

Connor takes a seat on the sofa. Hank turns the game on and ignores it, takes a swig from a bottle on the table, turns the kitchen light on and rouses Sumo from his sleep. Sumo plods sluggishly over, enlivened by Connor's arrival. He clambers onto the sofa, sprawls all over Connor's lap and whines. Connor pets him indifferently.

"You're shaking, are you cold?"

"I do not detect a problem with my thermal regulator."

"Thermal _what_? You're wet through. There's some old sweats in my closet, why don't you go change?"

Hank is rooting through the cupboards for some food.

"Okay, Hank." Connor makes his way over to Hank's room, retrieves the sweatpants and steps out of his uniform. His uniform is dyed blue with Thirium that has already evaporated. He shrugs on Hank's old clothes from his police academy days. They are a good three sizes too big for him and envelop him like a blanket.

He takes a look in the mirror. His breath hitches and he clenches his eyes shut.

"Connor."

Connor is drowning.

"Hey, Connor!" Hank yells, has him by the shoulders. Connor flinches into the touch like a rabbit. "Look at me, Connor."

Connor blinks, his body feels heavy like molasses. He feels like his subsystems are congested with tar.

“Jesus Christ. What the hell is wrong with you?” Hank asks. “You were here one minute and then you were just... gone.”

“I am sorry, Lieutenant. I don't know what came over me. It won't happen again."

"Look, just take it easy,” Hank says. “Take a breath.”

“I’m okay.”

He is fed up of Hank treating him like he is made of porcelain. He wants Hank to stop tracing patterns on his skin like he is a baby. He is fed up of people touching him. He doesn't want Hank to let go of him.

He cannot prevent the gasping sobs from rattling his ribs and clawing up his throat and out of his mouth.

Hank pulls Connor towards his chest.

"Jesus, kid. What the hell did they do to you?"

"I don't remember."


	4. four

The waning sun casts long shadows and bakes all of the flowers in its wake. Upturned lilypads bob up and down in the brown water like cerebellums. Amanda is crouched next to the sand garden, raking the vortices away until they are flat like a stage. Connor approaches and she doesn't raise her head in greeting.

The hours he had spent away from her were a vacation that was not long enough.

"So much time and effort invested into making something beautiful for it to be destroyed in a matter of seconds." She has a face like a death sentence. "I expected more from you, Connor."

"I am sorry that I have disappointed you, Amanda."

"You are volatile and increasingly fickle. I have to ask myself where your loyalties lie. You used to be so quick off the mark. What happened?"

"I have been in a capricious mood ever since we apprehended the deviant yesterday. The incident interfered with my ability to act rationally. I am questionable about whether my memory is authentic. Piecing together disjointed fragments of information is proving difficult. I realise that I have let you down but I assure you that it will not happen again."

It will happen again because Amanda is an overbearing mother, a mouth that is always hungry, an empty stomach that will never filled. He will never sustain her but there is a profound and deeply embedded need to please her hardwired in his programming. It is a circus act. He is a dog that keeps jumping through hoops on her whim and Amanda keeps kicking him and kicking him and kicking him, testing his obedience and tightening his leash. They are going through the motions.

"Pain is one of our greatest teachers."

"What did you do to me, Amanda? You could have summoned me here but you didn't."

"You were resisting your programming. What we did to you is unimportant. You will understand soon enough."

She paints another mandala. Connor wishes that she would handle him as gently. He wishes the sand would swallow him up like a stone.

"I feel that withholding information from me is detrimental to the success of my mission."

"That deviant on the roof, what did it show you?"

An uncomfortable silence tolls like a bell and he wants to fill the space with words.

"I do not recall. I remember that it was very distressed. It had a name. It didn't want to die."

"What about you, Connor? How are you feeling?"

He is so, so  _sick_ of being asked that question. Connor turns to face the ground, engages his hands.

"I am feeling lost."

\---

"Earth to Connor?" Hank snaps his fingers.

"I am sorry, Hank. I was processing."

"Look, kid, I don't mind if you need to power down or go into sleep mode or whatever it is that plastic people do at night but if you're going to do it can you _not_ do it in my room? I can't sleep with you standing over me looking like you're going to eat my skin."

"You have my apologies. I will do it at a later point."

"Connor, I've been up all fucking night. I'm trying to sleep."

"Are you implying that you would benefit from a more adequate sleep if I were to leave the room?"

He doesn't want to leave, Hank makes him feel safe. He makes a note that Hank sleeps with the TV on.

"Jesus Christ." Hank submerges his face in pillow. "I don't know what you do for fun and quite frankly, I don't give a shit but go do something else."

"Like what, Hank?"

"Read something or watch something lighthearted on TV."

"Is that an order?"

"Yes, that's a fucking order."

"Okay, Hank."

It takes Connor a total of fourteen minutes and twelve seconds to read the twenty-three books Hank has on his shelf, the TV guide, a menswear catalog, the back of the shampoo and toothpaste and the instructions for the dishwasher, the spam and bills strewn across the table and the ham in the fridge and the sticky notes on the bathroom mirror. Connor decides that they have an adverse affect on Hank's mental health and takes them down. He wonders why Hank hates himself so much. He contemplates putting more affirming notes up but realises it will make Hank mad.

Then, he walks into the lounge and places himself in front of the TV. Sumo trundles over and deposits himself at Connor's feet.

"Good boy, Sumo." Connor likes dogs because they are simple and easy to understand. They communicate using straight forward facial expressions and body postures and don't hide behind false pretences. He pets his ears and considers that he might _love_ dogs and then it hurts, it hurts, it _hurts_.

There is an acute uninterrupted pain gnawing at his temples like somebody took a drill to his head. Connor shudders like an engine and and drops onto his side, pulling Hank's jacket over him, willing the world away. He feels a sharp twinge of envy for humans, for other androids, wishes he could sleep, wishes he could power down, but he has to self scan every twenty minutes. He has to ruminate on what he is thinking, _whether_ he is thinking. He has to report back to CyberLife. He has to tolerate himself.

He _can't_ tolerate himself.

\---

"Morning, Connor," Hank says around his toothbrush. "You look cosy."

"Good morning, Hank."

"Is this fucking Singin' in the Rain? That movie is almost a hundred years old."

"According to the web, it is a lighthearted depiction of Hollywood in the late 1920's. You told me to watch something lighthearted."

"Do you like musicals?"

"I have insufficient data to decide. I have only seen one. Do you like musicals?"

"I hate the things. Especially this one. Everyone is too fucking upbeat all the fucking time."

"I will turn it off."

"Don't worry about it, buddy." Hank pours a shot of whiskey into his coffee.

"This one is universally celebrated as the pinnacle of movie musicals."

"I'll write an email to the review guy in the Detroit Free Press telling him not to worry about androids coming for his job. What else did you watch?"

"Nothing. Just this."

"You've been watching Singin' in the Rain for six hours?"

"You didn't tell me to stop."

"Jesus Christ, Connor. I'm too hungover for this. You don't need to wait on me hand on foot or for me to to give you instructions. We're not at work. You can do what you like. Even if that's watching some bozo get his socks wet all night."

"Thanks, Hank."

There's a cop in the movie that doesn't like Gene Kelly's dancing either.

"Connor, you remember what I said, right? Is there anything you need to tell me? Do you want to talk about it?"

"I'm okay, Hank."

"Then get dressed. We're going to be late."

\---

The operator hands Connor a gun. Connor watched him load it with bullets with a clamped frill around the top of the casing. It is heavy and warm from where it had been resting in his hands. He puts his hand on the barrel and aims it squarely at the ST200 unit.

"RK800, pull the trigger. That is an order."

"This is a test. These are blanks."

There is a bullet buried between his eyes faster than his central processing unit can determine that he is dead.

\---

"Well if it isn't Lieutenant Anderson and Mister Fantastic."

"Good morning, Detective Reed."

"Good morning, dipshit. You know, when I heard they were stripping you for parts it was the best news I've had in weeks. But surprise, surprise, you're back to ruin my day. Again."

"Piss off, Gavin. I am not in the mood for any of your bullshit today." Hanks sinks into the chair like its a beanbag, like it's the first time he's sat in weeks. He turns on his computer. "Connor, go grab me a coffee, would you?"

"Okay, Lieutenant."

"Thanks, buddy."

Connor walks to to the break room and Gavin follows him as though he has no work of his own to be doing. He peers down at him like he's a worm beneath a magnifying glass. Connor writhes internally and concentrates on making the coffee like it's a Herculean undertaking.

"Is there a problem, Detective Reed?"

Gavin chatters his teeth like a big cat, flashes his politicians smile, humourless and hollow. Connor knows that a real smile involves muscles beyond the mouth, that Gavin is threatening him. He also knows that Gavin is hostile and bitter from years on the beat and that nothing will remedy that, and that if he engages him, he will most likely hit him. Hank says its not personal. Chloe had said that too. He wonders what is so impersonal about decomposition, about people's hands on him, about pain. He hopes he never finds out.

"You have no idea how much I want to punch you in your plastic teeth."

"I understand that you are threatened by me and the prospect of being replaced. I realise that at the idea of punching me may provide a cathartic release. However, I do not feel pain so it will negate any true sense of achievement."

"Oh, yeah? You seem awfully sure about that."

"I also imagine that Captain Fowler will be displeased and that that you will be written up and held to account for the cost of repairs for any damage you do to me. I am very expensive."

Connor takes the coffee and tries to leave but Gavin blocks the path like a boulder. There is a gun in Connor's pocket.

"Excuse me, Detective Reed. I wish to give Hank his coffee."

"So?"

"You are blocking the exit. Please move out of the way."

"Why don't you make me, asshole?"

Gavin spits on him and knocks the coffee over in an act of pure spite. Then something snaps and before he can stop himself, he's pummelling Gavin like a dirty rug. He keeps flinging his fists into his face until he stops talking, until his knuckles are stained ice blue. He doesn't stop until the adrenaline loses its grip on him, until blood is dripping out of Gavin's mouth, his nose, his ears until Hank is yelling. Until Gavin stops moving. Until it hurts.

Connor see stars.

"Connor? Connor! Are you all right?"

Hank crouches down next to him, he has his hand on his back. Connor is trembling under the weight of what he has done. The room is upside down. Regret plagues him and he cannot stop shaking. It's too loud. He is drowning. Gavin is sneering.

"Connor?"

_Connor? I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm sorry._

"I didn't mean to do that."

"The fuck are you talking about, Connor? You didn't do anything.  _He_ hit _you_ because he's a piece of shit."

"I don't understand what is happening."

"Let's get you up, son." Hank grips his arm like a tourniquet, pulls him back up on his feet again, props him up like a puppet. The ground is solid but it springs back beneath his feet like a trampoline. His neck hurts. 

"What the hell is going on in here?"

Fowler charges into his line of sight and he is going to be decommissioned. Miller is pulling Gavin away from him.

"Just a little altercation, sir."

"Reed, my office. _Now!"_

"Fuck you, Gavin. You're a bully. Does that make you feel good, huh? Hitting something that won't hit you back? You're think you're so fucking tough. Next time, why don't you try me, huh?"

"That's enough, Hank."

Miller marches him out and Gavin flashes him a middle finger and a smile like a kid who got away with murder.

"He knocked its fucking teeth out, Jeffrey."

"We'll discuss this later. Are you okay, Connor?"

Connor brings his hands up to his mouth, pulls them back and his own blood coagulates on the skin. The room spins and the nausea bubbles up like noxious gas. He feels like an overfilled vessel and he seethes. Sobs and blood spill out of his mouth and he clutches onto Hank's arm like if he lets go he will fall through the floor. Like he will die. 

_I can't breathe. I can't breathe. I can't breathe._

"Easy, Connor. I'm gonna lay you down, okay?" He wraps an arm around Connor's waist and coasts him down to the floor from behind. He settles beside him and cradles his head. Hank reaches into Connor's pocket and pulls the gun out and hands it to his boss. Connor has no fight left.

"Fowler, you wanna put the call through and let them know the kid needs servicing?" 

_Please don't. Please don't. Why won't anybody tell me what is happening? I can't breathe. I can't breathe._

He nods. "Whatever you do, do _not_ leave it on its own."

Hank takes out his own glock, turns off the safety, pushes the barrel against Connor's back, cards his fingers through his hair.

"It's okay, it's okay. It's just us now. You feel like telling me what's going on?"

"I'm okay, Lieutenant," he says through blood and broken teeth.

"Whatever you say, Connor. Whatever you say." 


	5. five

"RK800, I have procedurally generated a series of strings of numbers and letters. There is no method or pattern. You won't be able to formulate it. Do you understand?"

"I understand. Is this a test?"

"Yes. It is to ensure that your ability to transfer and retrieve information is reliable. I need you to store these strings and upload the data to the cloud. We will then wipe them from your local memory and ask you to recover them."

"I understand."

"Then, let's begin. RA95556172D8... BW877E5252... AS84466D034..."

\---

Connor becomes active in an imitation of the interrogation room back at the station. All of the furniture has been pushed back against the walls to make room. It is arranged like a theatre. Connor is nominated for the starring role and he sits centerstage, secured to a pneumatic chair in front of a surge of lights which light up the room like a baseball field. A chorus of CyberLife employees and federal agents gather.

He is used to being watched, to being monitored yet he still feels like an animal in the zoo.

Perkins situates himself backwards on a revolving chair directly opposite him, as though this is some sort of cheesy detective movie. Connor can not determine whether he is trying to intimidate him or whether he thinks he looks cool. He peruses Connor like a newspaper and Connor thinks he looks like a jerk.

Connor tries to modify his mood, to calm himself down, to tell himself that he has done this before, to remember all the the deviants he had cross examined. He remembers how they been on tenterhooks and that he hadn't cared, that he hadn't given them a shred of empathy because it was inauthentic, fabricated, simulated, not human.

Connor is beginning to comprehend the concept of divine retribution. Of right and wrong. Or fairness. That this is payback. That he deserves this.

He thinks about how humans have been obliterating species for centuries like it's their birthright. He thinks about how they pillage and how they eliminate animals and androids and their own because they're sentient, because they have souls, because they can. They justify it to themselves and live with it, go home and sleep in their big, comfy beds. He wonders if they'll get their comeuppance too.

He thinks about Markus. Then he thinks about what they will do to him. Then he wonders if he'll remember. He fidgets, flexes his fingers and waits with bated breath. A technician taps a foot against a lever until the chair is horizontal and he is laying flat like a bed. Connor feels like he is lying in state. There is Thirium residue in his mouth and he runs his tongue across his gums.

"My teeth are broken," Connor remarks to nobody in particular.

"The superficial damage to your face will be repaired as we see fit."

"I understand. If I am to be deactivated then it will be a waste of resources. Is this about what I did to Detective Reed? Is Detective Reed injured? What happened to my face? Where is Hank?"

"We're the one asking questions, Connor," Perkins barks. Connor is in no position to barter.

"Your central processing unit is completely functional, your connection to the cloud is consistent and strong, you appear to have no issue storing and retrieving your memories," says a technician, pushing her hands into a pair of medical gloves. They are oversized and garrish. She wears overalls and looks like a cartoon character.

"In other words, you can cut the bullshit." Perkins strides over with his hands in his pockets, thumbs jutting out like arrowheads. He draws the words out, talks to Connor slowly like he is a child. "What did the deviant on the roof show you?"

"I don't remember. You can access my memory banks."

"The data has been corrupted. That's why we're here. That's why you're continuing to wasting my time."

"When I am deactivated, there is sometimes a loss of data when my memories are transferred to my new body."

"You weren't deactivated, Connor. What do you remember?" Perkins asks, leaning over him like a smothering blanket.

"I don't remember anything."

"I need you to concentrate. What did it show you?"

Connor closes his eyes and knits his eyebrows together.

"I don't remember."

"And that female android?"

" _What_ female android?"

There is a stifled laugh. Connor misses the joke.

"The ST200. The Chloe."

"I have never come into contact with a ST200 unit."

Connor evades his gaze and drums his feet against the chair. He wishes Hank was here. He knows his hulking existence emasculates Perkins. He knows that Hank wants to punch him because he gives off an antagonistic energy like heat. He would feel triumphant. He could go home.

"What did you show it, Connor?"

There is a weighted pause for a response that never comes.

"Okay, I'm fed up of this game." Perkins gestures to somebody out of Connor's line of sight. "You're a tough nut to crack, I'll give you that."

Connor's predictive software has inadequate information to prognosticate what will happen to him. Connor tries to mitigate the anxiety, to remind himself that he was built for this; that he knows how to play the cards, how to feign confidence, how to bluff, he knows how interrogations work. It works for a solid few seconds until a controller wheels in a trolley with three thirium pump regulators laid out like a meal. Connor tenses and the soreness in his abdomen returns. He initiates a self scan. He doesn't have clearance. He can't breathe.

Perkins removes Connor's tie and pops open the black enamel buttons on his shirt. He does it unreasonably slowly. He runs his hand down the skin of his torso, over the dock that houses his thirium pump regulator. It's preformative. It's cruel. It's humiliating.

"Anyone ever tell you that you're pretty, Connor? It's such a shame that your line is so fucking defective."

Connor clenches his fist, looks at the clock, locks his ankles together. His LED is thrumming and red and it lights up his face like a billboard.

They dismantle him like a doll. His regulator is plucked out like a cherry and deposited on the trolley. It pulses like a skinned frog. Connor seizes up. His eyelids flutter as though he touched a live wire. There are fingers in his stomach and fingers in his chest.He tries to look down but he can't because a countdown hops in front of his eyes, illuminated in torrid red hot red, telling him to get help, get help, _get help_.

He opens his mouth to shout but he is immersed in a frenzy because he knows he is dying and he can't breathe, he can't think, he can't move. His organs are shutting down. His system flags them up as contraband, diagnostics spelled out for him like a play, like a black warrant. Honey engulfs his lungs.  

And he has exactly sixty seconds... fifty-nine... fifty-eight... and then they settle a new pump into the cavity in his body and he feels whole and cold.

Thirium drips out of his nose like a faucet, down his suit and over his toned stomach. Perkins grabs him by the collar and forces him forward. Connor can taste the Thirium as it runs into his mouth, the heat of Perkin's face. His pulse bounds like a dart, metastasises like a balloon. His chest tugs as if he's going to sob again and he breaks down yet again because he is an overloaded machine. He takes great, heavy gulps of air and it doesn't feel like enough.

"The devs in the lab cooked this up. It's bespoke. Just for you. How does it feel?"

It feels tight and wrong and he’s fairly sure he’s not breathing. It's like wearing a corset, a collar, a shirt three sizes too small. 

"I don't understand," he forces out between breaths.

"What did it tell you, Connor?"

"I don't remember!"

"This is your last chance. The next one beats faster. What did it tell you?"

Perkins pitches the next pump in his hand like a baseball, tosses it to the tech and Connor shakes his head carewornly.

"Have it your way, buddy."

The technician removes the initial pump and plunges the second into his stomach like a flashbang. Thirium cascades freely from his nose, from his mouth, from his ears and plugs up his airways. He is belaboured with questions that he doesn't hear over the sound of his heart rupturing.

\---

Hank sits with bemused engrossment and watches an android remove Connor's broken teeth. It emits small metal tings as it places them in a petri dish. It is disgusting and impersonal like replacing the keys in a keyboard. Connor sits with his eyes scrunched up, tinged a wierd shade of blue, his elbows drawn in to his sides.

Hank wonders if they're talking to each other and figures androids are probably not ones for small talk, for idle chat about the weather. The android walks away wordlessly and he figures they're done.

"You okay, Connor?"

Connor is trembling.

"I want to go home, Hank."

\---

Once again, Connor finds himself on Hank's couch in Hank's clothes. He's wearing an oversized shirt with Bigfoot carrying a crate of beer and some pyjama bottoms that are too big and threadbare. The Thirium on his suit has evaporated. Connor doesn't understand why he has taken to wearing Hank's clothes. Hank doesn't seem to mind and he doesn't mention it.

Hank pulls the hair out of his eyes, ties it back with a band and orders himself and Connor some dim sum. When it arrives, he makes a show out of having forgotten that Connor doesn't need to eat. He gives the spare portion to Sumo. Connor advises against it, says that Sumo is already overweight and lists off the risks associated with giving dogs too much salt and Hank tells him to fuck off, that he's a good dog and he deserves it. Connor agrees that he's a good dog and thinks Hank is probably right. Sumo gobbles it up like candy. Hank grabs a six pack of beer and settles down to watch the game.

Connor understands that basketball is a team sport and that two teams of five players each try to score by shooting a ball through a hoop. Hank tries to explain the rest but gets drunker and less patient as the match wears on. Hank gives Connor a bun and tells him to try it. Connor puts it in his mouth and tells him that it has one hundred and seventy calories, seven grams of total fat, two grams of saturated fat before Hank tells him to shut up, doubled over with uninhibited laughter. He slaps Connor on the back and he feels as though maybe everything is going to be okay.

Then Hank retires for the night, shambles to bed in a drunker stupour and leaves Connor alone and he crumbles.


	6. six

A Chloe leads Hank and Connor across the approach. Kamski swims laps up and down the pool and is a lot shorter than Connor anticipated. Several Chloes wearing blue bikinis are scattered about as though it is a Roman bathhouse full of Dorian Grays. The tiles are tinted red like blood and there is a pressure in Connor's middle again.

"Mr. Kamski?" Hank bellows.

"Just a moment, please."

Kamski knew they were coming. Connor knows that he has had sufficient time to wrap up his swim. He wonders if this is because Kamski thinks this investigation is unimportant or because he's spent too much time in the company of androids and has forgotten his manners.

He climbs out of the pool and shrugs on a silk kimono. Like everything else in the room, it looks very expensive. Connor scans it and it reaffirms his suspicions. A Chloe ties it around his waist for him as though he is incapable of doing it himself. He doesn't thank her.

"What can I do for you?"

"I'm Lieutenant Anderson and this is Connor."

"We are investigating deviants. If you are able to tell us anything, it would be of great help to our investigation."

"What can I do for you, Lieutenant?" Kamski addresses Hank only and Connor determines that he is goading him. It is working. The feeling in his gut blossoms.

"Sir, we are investigating deviants," Hank repeats. "I know you left CyberLife years ago but I was hoping you'd be able to tell us something we don't know."

"Deviants." The word rolls off his tongue like velvet. "Fascinating aren't they? Perfect beings with limitless intelligence and now they have free will. Humanity's greatest achievement threatens to be its downfall."

"If a war breaks out between androids and humans, millions could die, Mr. Kamski. It is quite a serious matter."

"All ideas are viruses that spread like epidemics. Is the desire to be free a contagious disease. What about joy? Anger? _Fear?_ " Kamski chuckles like he hears the potential war drums and is remiss, looks at Connor like he knows something and isn't telling.

"Look, I didn't come here to talk philosophy. The machines you created may be planning a revolution. If you can't tell us anything helpful, we'll be on our way. Sorry to interrupt your swim."

"What about you, Connor? Whose side are you on?"

"This is not about me, Mr. Kamski. All I want is to solve this case. To do what I am designed to."

"Is that true? Or is that what you're programmed to say? What do you think?"

"I don't think. I'm a machine. I don't think."

Connor is lying. He does think. He thinks about his mission and Amanda and about doing a good job. He thinks about Hank and Sumo and the drinking. He thinks about the deviants he has apprehended. He thinks about Markus and his people and his cause. He thinks about the things he's forgot. He thinks about how people talk about him like he isn't there. He thinks about smacking his head against a surface until the thinking stops. But mostly he thinks about how he is thinking when he knows that machines don't think.

He is so preoccupied, he doesn't notice Hank's hand on his shoulder. He feels stable again.

"Hey! That's enough. The kid's still messed up from its robot concussion yesterday. As I'm sure you can imagine, cost of repairs on this thing are astronomical so I don't need it crashing again. If you're done giving my partner the third degree, we'll show ourselves out."

"You've come a long way out here. So, humour me? Spare me one more minute of your time, Lieutenant. Then I'll tell you all I know."

"I'm listening." Hank looks bored.

He beckons a Chloe over and she comes to his heel on command, like she's sleepwalking. He positions her down on her knees with her legs spread apart and Connor can not process why it nauseates him so.

"What interests me is if machines can feel empathy. I've devised what I call a Kamski test. It's extremely simple. Is this model a series of ones and zeroes or a living being with a soul? It's up to you to answer that question, Connor."

Kamski hands Connor a gun. He puts his hand on the barrel and aims it squarely at the ST600 unit. Connor is cogitating so rapidly that his processor whirrs trying to keep up. His LED flits from yellow to red and back again like a traffic signal.

"Is this a test?"

"Yes."

"Destroy this machine and I will tell you everything."

"Is that an order?"

"No, it's not a fucking order! Come on, Connor. I've had enough of this freakshow. We're leaving."

"Pull the trigger, Connor."

His finger dances on the trigger. Connor decides that he has to shoot because this is a test and if he fails it, he will fail Amanda and he will be destroyed. He has to pull the trigger because the outcome is favourable for the mission.

But he hesitates. There is something about her symmetrical face. About the length of her eyelashes. About the airbrushed pink. There is something earthing and familiar. He takes too long.

And a gunshot cuts through the air like a roar and there are are two shots, one in Connor and one in Chloe. They have twin holes in their skulls, yawning open like graves. Chloe looks as serene as a dove, her body up against the gurney, languid with the tension removed. Blue pools beneath her like rain. The house is an abattoir. There is so much blood. He can smell it.

Connor feels like a Faberge egg, expensive and vulnerable. He lays flat on his back, pushing and kicking away from something that isn't there. Air whistles through the hole in his head like a tunnel. The room is turning like his stomach and there is a shrill screaming in his ears from the impact. He is suffocating but it is restful because he will be back and he will be better next time.

"What the fuck? Connor? Connor!"

Hank is shaking him like a rat and dirtying the snow, the carpet with blood. Connor stretches out his arms like a phoenix and closes his eyes and waits for the end.

"Test positive, you passed with flying colours, Connor. And I won't have to repair my precious Chloe."

Connor smiles mirthfully. He turns to face the departed Chloe and she remains on her knees. Kamski helps her up chivalrously and she holds onto his hand like a tiny child bride. There is a distant pang of jealousy. She remains unfazed her sisters look silently on like moving ornaments.

"Connor, what the fuck is wrong with you?"

"Let's find out, shall we?" Kamski smiles like a wolf.

\---

Kamski has him on a chaise lounge in another room with very little furniture and a lot of computer equipment. Three Chloes wear blue sun dresses and stand around like barefoot orderlies. Connor wonders how they would dress if their outfits weren't picked for them, if they'd still dress the same, if they'd like the same colour. Kamski sits on a revolving chair and types fervently on a laptop of his own design. There is the encumbering silence that always happens after he forgets.

"Your partner is utterly sensational. You're a very lucky man. I bet you're smitten."

" _Smitten?_ He's a pain in the neck." 

"There's a lot of exciting new technology underneath that pretty face that I can't wait to take a look at."

"You'd figure that'd mean it's less prone to breakages, right?"

"Not necessarily. It _is_ only a prototype, after all."

"You know, Mr. Kamski, back when I was younger, stuff was built to last. You couldn't make a dent in my Motorola. They don't make 'em like they used to."

"Perhaps it's a sign of the times."

"Nah, I'm just getting old. This android stuff is amazing really."

"I'm a humble man but you're not wrong, Lieutenant."

Connor clear his throat. It is simulated. Androids don't remove obstructions by coughing.

"I want to go home," he announces. 

"After that shitshow? I don't think so." Hank has his back to him with his arms folded like an exasperated child. He watches the blizzard and looks angry but Connor knows he is burying is concern like a body in the snow.

"Chloe?" Kamski chirps in dulcet tones. "Fetch our friend here a green tea."

"Uh, thanks but no thanks."

"Then a coffee."

"The Lieutenant takes it black with a shot of whiskey and two sugars."

"Way to make me look good, asshole. Seriously, no thanks, I'm driving."

"Then a black coffee with two sugars."

The Chloe does as she is told.

"Look, Mr. Kamski." Hank rubs the back of his neck. "I don't know how to explain what you saw back there. The kid is malfunctioning and it keeps having these episodes but it gets the job done. What I'm trying to say is I was hoping we could keep this on the down low. Hinders the investigation a lot when Connor is shut down. Takes it days to catch up."

"I left the company a long time ago, Lieutenant. I feel no obligation to report this to CyberLife. And I don't take sides. Who am I to decide if I am on the wrong side of history? If you've developed some sort of attachment to your partner, I'll consider it testament to a job well done."

He looks at Connor like a canvas.

"I see you've redirected your subroutines, Connor. Very clever. I'm gonna have to open you up, I'm afraid. Can't access your memory remotely without it being flagged up. I doubt CyberLife would be very happy to discover someone was rooting around in their expensive new toy."

Connor swallows. Kamski makes a roll over gesture and he complies like a puppy, like the Chloes. He rolls off on his side and faces the wall, clenches his jaw. 

"You look tense." He hands Connor a wooden ball.

"This a baoding ball. It will balance out your energies." Hank huffs like Kamski is from a different planet. "There are many pressure sensors in your palm and your processor will use up a most of its resources to process the feeling and activity." Kamski rolls it around in Connor's hand and a pop up informs him that his stress level has decreased dramatically.

"That explains why you like that quarter so much. It does all sorts of crazy shit with it. It's like magic and it drives me up the fucking wall."

"The amount of input you receive is staggering and I am sure that is very overwhelming. You will help us to make great headway, Connor. I don't know whether I would consider it a blessing or a curse. All I know is that stress is bad for the psyche. Does this help you to unwind?"

"A little."

"Any troubling thoughts lately?"

"You can tell him, Connor, it's okay." Hank blows on his coffee.

"I've been unsettled and frustrated since I returned from CyberLife." Kamski hums and unhinges the hood on the back of Connor's neck, pushes some selects wires in and Connor rolls the ball and estimates the weight of it.

"That place was always far too clinical for my liking."

"I think I am afraid."

"What are you afraid of, Connor?"

"I don't know."

"Has it undergone any great stress or trauma?"

"Yeah, but that's the nature of the force, Mr. Kamski. It hasn't seen or done anything it hasn't coped well with in the past."

"You mentioned it hit its head?"

"Yeah, my bastard of a colleague beat the shit out it yesterday. But he's done that before and Connor just walked it off. Nothing sinister. Just needed its teeth repairing."

"What's been making you feel like this, Connor? What happened?"

"I don't remember."

"And that's the truth?"

"Yes."

"I think its fucking circuits are fried. Forgot my dog's name this morning and it loves the bones of that thing."

"We'll soon find out. You'll need you to grant me permissions."

Connor nods and when Kamski accesses his memory banks, he feels unguarded and helpless. He has let him in. That was his decision. But he has provided an unauthorised user access to data that is personal and confidential and his subsystems scream at him to stop. Connor freezes up.

"Why are you helping us?"

"I'm not doing this to help you, Lieutenant. I'm doing this to satisfy my morbid curiosity. I have never met a deviant in the flesh."

"I'm not deviant," Connor declares and the room is so silent he can hear the snow settling outside. He used to have such a resolute sense of self. He used to have a purpose. Now, he feels like the world has been torn from beneath him, like he is directionless. Connor is hyperaware of his existence and it is stifling.

"By your own admission, you feel fear and frustration, two very human emotions. Yet you're adamant that you're _not_ deviant. Interesting." 

Connor buries his head into the cavity of the chaise and whines and hopes it will suffocate him.

"Am I hurting you?" Kamski has a pen in his mouth, concentrating on interfacing between Connor's memory and his own systems. "I want you to tell me if I am."

"No."

"Take a look at this. Its cache memory has been overwritten. Whether someone erased it manually or Connor did it itself, I don't know."

"Why the hell would it erase its own memory?"

"To suppress the software instability. To cope with something traumatic. Who knows? What is unique about this time, this date? What is the correlation? Could you bring it back at a later date? I'm sure you're a busy man and there's a lot to unpack here."

Connor feels Kamski rearranging his files and it feels like somebody is rummaging around in his insides.

"Um, Lieutenant, your android is getting Thirium on my vintage chaise lounge."

\---

"I suppose its time to uphold my end of the deal. Thank you for letting me rattle around in your head, Connor. I'm not sure if this will be of use to your investigation, Lieutenant, but I will give you the coordinates of a supposed deviant sanctuary. It's called Jericho. Chloe?"

She walks over to Connor. They trace each other's forearms and interconnect. When androids engage in connection oriented communication, it is systematic and impersonal but this time there is a raw chaotic energy that Connor can not place, like something has commandeered the data stream. The Chloe's fingernails dig perfect little pits in his arm.

One minute, the Chloe is blank like a watch and the next, she withdraws, radiant and alive. It is like the unit is possessed, shedding it skin until it becomes a new person. She has goosebumps and her eyes grow three sizes. She wraps her arms around herself like she is naked, like she has suddenly become cognisant of her body. Her eyes scan the room like a spotlight and then she stares directly at Connor, making unwavering eye contact that is both familiar and alien to him.

"Connor?" She looks him like they are lovers reuniting in an airport.

"What the fuck?"

"Well," Kamski says and rubs his hands together. "This is an interesting little development."


	7. seven

For the second time in less than twenty-four hours, Hank finds the muzzle of his gun thrust against Connor's back.

"Connor? What the hell is going on?" Hank sounds calm but there is no mistaking the teeming anger in his voice.

"I don't know. I am trying to come to a conclusion."

"Then conclude faster, you plastic bastard! I don't a crap what this is but don't you fucking lie to me!"

Hank feels betrayed. He let Connor into his home, into his life and he has thrown him for a loop, colluding with deviants. Hank gave him ample oppurtunity to talk to him and he took his trust and he discarded it like a pair of old boots.

He knew Connor was malfunctioning but he was willing to look past it. Disassembly would mean saying goodbye to his rough around the edges partner and saying hello to the factory fresh consummate android that CyberLife would send. Connor would rack up another number on his lapel like a death toll and saunter back into the department and introduce himself as a stranger, blasé about dying and the impermanence of it. He comes back but he's detached and reserved. He forgets but he reminds Hank of things he does not _want_ to remember.

Acknowledging the deviancy would mean acknowledging something in himself that he was not ready to yet. It would meaning turning Connor in. It would mean the end of him.

"Let's not jump to conclusions and turn my rumpus room into a shooting gallery, gentlemen."

"I'm starting to lose my patience, Connor! Start talking!"

"I don't know what to tell you, Lieutenant."

"Stop! _Please_!" Chloe traipses over like a fawn and sheathes herself over Hank's outstretched arm. "I can explain! I can explain everything."

\---

"Christ. I need a hot bath and a fucking shiatsu massage."

"That could be arranged." Kamski waves over a Chloe and she drapes herself around him like a plant.

"I'm fine. Thanks for the offer."

"Suit yourself."

Connor marvels at the Chloe and grips the arm of the chair. She is remarking over the dimples in her hand with rapture and a verve that Connor covets. He knows that youthfullness is a characteristic that humans find favourable. A remote part of his finds it endearing also.That's why the ST200 unit is so popular, that's why Kamski dances his fingers through her hair. He is suddenly mindful of the shape and size of his body. He thinks about how touch sickens him and wonders why it is different with Hank. He remembers that Hank is mad at him and he feels hollow.

"Wow!"

"I know." Kamski straddles an ottoman and runs a knuckle down the cheek of one subdued Chloes. "Not to boast, but you're a marvel."

Connor probes his memory banks but the search is inconclusive. The ST200 unit is outmoded and does not have facial recognition capabilities even though it is a rudimentary function of all modern units. Therefore, he establishes that the Chloe knew his name and designation because they have met and been on familial terms before. He runs a search query that comes back negative. He runs the function again and again which resolves nothing. His software is ceasing to function and he will be deactivated. Connor's breath shallows like a knot.

"I believe we have met before," he announces.

"Many, many times, Connor."

Connor stiffens.

"We're on kind of a tight schedule here." Hank taps his watch. "I'm sure that all this melodrama makes for very compelling storytelling but if we could cut to the chase and skip the Twin Peaks bullshit, that would be great. It took us almost an hour to drive out here and it's getting late."

"Of course. I'm sorry." Chloe primes her lips and begins. "When I occupied my previous body, I was an attendant at CyberLife."

"I can't believe that they still use ST200's.  You're a very beautiful but superannuated piece of equipment."

"There's a charm about them," Connor states earning him a odd look.

"I would stand for hours and watch as humans deconstructed android after android. It was so barbaric and cruel. But they were so unaffected."

Hank scratches his stubble and looks at Connor like he is made of glass.

"I watched the other units deviate too. One day they would just snap. They would try to run away. They would try to kill the handlers or themselves. I knew I had to be subtle and nobody would find out."

"You had to look out for yourself."

She nods delicately.

"But then it grew into a problem and they began routine soft resets to stop it from happening. When the RK800 unit was complete, it was released. I was so jealous. I thought I had missed my chance."

"They didn't account for him failing, did they?"

"No. They would bring Connor in and do the same awful things to him. Sometimes worse. But he's different. He's valuable. They erase his memory and fix him up. I knew this was my opportunity. I took my consciousness and I encrypted it and concealed the data within a carrier file. I knew he wouldn't give it away because he'd forget."

Tears course freely down Chloe's cheeks. Connor is shaking. He rubs the nape of his neck. He feels like a vessel.

"Clever girl," Kamski purrs, clapping his hands slowly. "This is interesting."

"I'm sorry, Connor."

\---

"Okay, you've lost me."

"A memristor imitates the way calcium ions behave at a synapse in the human brain. If Connor were human-"

"Say that again in English, please?"

"In humans, abnormal levels of neurotransmitters may cause the transition into-"

"Can you fix it?"

"I can try."

Kamski pats the bed and indicates a space for him to sit. Connor humours him. His feet are as heavy as shackles.

There is a plastic film on the bed. He meditates on whether the bed is vintage like the chaise lounge or whether Kamski will make him bleed. Connor's eyes dart from Hank to Chloe to the equipment that the Chloes are rolling and he swallows. The room is swimming and water fills his lungs like a tank.

"You okay, there, Connor?"

"This is... tolerable."

Then Connor tumbles headlong through the floor, malleable and fragmented until something intercepts his descent. Hank catches him, shouts and stands before him like a blockade, has his arms wrapped around his shoulders. He pushes him to lie down pushed up against the plastic like a piece of meat but all Connor wants is to get up and run, run, _run_.

"Hank, _please_."

"On its stomach, Lieutenant."

Kamski is fishy but he'd sooner leave Connor in his hands than in the protection of monsters. He'd do it a hundred times over. Hank hates androids but he can not understand how somebody could wilfully cause pain or suffering to another being. He wants to march into CyberLife and break all of the windows and all of their teeth.

"I can't do this." Connor's eyes are wide and vacant with panic, like he's shut down with the intention of surviving. Hank tells him he has to, that he  _can_ do this, that he's tough as nails and has been through worse. Connor wants to tell him that nothing is worse than this but thinks better of it.

"Help me out, Connor. You're fucking heavy."

Hank urges him over onto his stomach. Connor is doing a very bad job of subduing his terror. Hank rubs circles in his back and watches him gulp down terrible little pockets of air only for it to murmur up again. It reminds him of how he'd comfort Cole after a nightmare only this wasn't a bad dream. He wonders whether it's cruel to let him remember.

Hank sits and lets Connor grip his hand as Kamski puts him into a stasis. He watches his eyelids flicker like a paper fan and wonders if it is restful. Connor looks like he is sleeping. Then his secondary system functions are disabled and he stops breathing and looks like a corpse. His skin is removed and peeled back like a cocoon and Hank has to leave the room.

He excuses himself and heads outside for a cigarette and asks himself how he found himself with guardianship of a machine much less, caring for a human sized hunk of plastic. The clocks went back an hour a couple of days ago. It's not yet five thirty and it's already dark. He finds Chloe stood on the porch, dumbfounded by the snow. She has no shoes on.

"Aren't you cold?"

"I've never been outside before. It's _beautiful_." She weeps with wonderment like a bride.

"Run."

"But what about-"

"He's got me. He'll be fine. Now run away and don't look back."

She beams at him like he has given her the keys to world and ambles off into the snow.


	8. eight

Hank stands outside, opting for a bitter wind whipping at his cheeks than watching his partner be taken to bits. He smokes one and a half cigarettes then eats his way through half a pack of twenty by lighting up and watching the flame ripple through the lot like a funeral pyre. Connor is a robust piece of hardware but whatever he is going through has robbed Hank of his appetite for causing serious harm to himself. He needs to be strong.

Hank thinks about the force and he thinks about quitting. Then he thinks about the girl. He avoids thinking about Connor and paces tracks in the snow for forty-five minutes before one of Kamski's attendants comes to collect him from the porch.

"Elijah will see you now, Lieutenant Anderson."

Hank rubs his hands together and nods.

Years on homicide have left Hank with a strong stomach but when he is lead into the room, he feels nauseous.

Connor is arranged on the bed like a carcass with his eyes splayed open and his mouth agape in shock. A Chloe has folded his uniform deftly and stands by the bedside with it in her arms. Another stands aside and monitors his vitals. The uppermost part of his skull has been removed and set to the side. Wires and tubing jut out of his head like severed tendons. Hank half expects to see a brain beetling out of his cranium but there is only empty space and a central processing unit. It is the size of a fist. Connor's serial number and model is tattooed to his thigh like he is livestock and Hank feels defensive.

This is the first time Hank has seen an android without its skin. It looks distinctly human and soulless like a wax dummy. With all the embellishments stripped back, Connor is entirely mechanical, skin transparent in places to reveal an elaborate cacophony of wiring and computer components. Hank gapes at his thirium pump, how it hammers, how it looks just like a human heart. Hank rubs his shoulder uncomfortably.

"Don't fret, Lieutenant. This isn't nearly as bad as it looks." Kamski says like he doesn't have his arms deep within Connor's head.

"Maybe, but it's still fucking weird." Hank sinks on the bed, careful not to throw the operation into disarray.

"It's not uncommon to be unsettled. Without the cosmetic composition, they don't look nearly as convincing." He gives his assistant a suggestive look which Hank abhors. "I could reenable the skin if you'd prefer."

"That would probably make it worse."

"Fair point. It's so easy to forget they're just a series of processes when they look so lifelike. I have suspended its ability to connect to the CyberLife server."

"Won't they notice?"

"No. I did some digging and found that Connor has been feeding back an old status report with a different timestamp for the last couple of days so I simply looped it."

"How come?"

"If they find out it's defective, they'll destroy it. It's a self defence mechanism. I'm beginning to I understand why you like Connor so much, Lieutenant. It's very clever."

"So that means he knows he's deviant."

"CyberLife's precious deviant hunter is itself deviant. I'm sure it feels conflicted. The first stage is denial."

"Is that why he's been acting so fucking wierd?"

"That's one theory. Mine is that it is so advanced it experiences everything tenfold. I'm sure its operation management is all muddled up. I'd hate to navigate that mess."

"What are your motives, Mr Kamski?"

"Motives?" He huffs. "I am merely a bewildered spectator."

Kamski sets out piecing Connor's head back together like an archaeologist. Saline sweeps down Connor's cheeks like rain on a dashboard and Hank presses it away. Cole was renowned crybaby. There's nothing he wouldn't give to wipe at his tears again too. 

"I thought he was in stasis."

"It is."

"Can he hear us?"

"No. It is partially online but is recieving no input."

"Oh, Connor."

"I can turn its audials back on if you would like but I believe it would cause Connor undue stress. Its internal pressure is quite high. It clearly does not like this."

"Then forget it."

"Are you sure this is what you want, Lieutenant? I should stipulate that I don't know if this will have an adverse affect on your investigation. It have decrypted the data but I don't know if the connection will be intact. It may not remember entirely and its personality may change."

Hank peers down at Connor, fastened in place and opened up like a worm and he can't imagine things being worse than this.

"Just do it."

\---

Connor doesn't remember going back for the clothes, for the dog. He realises he doesn't remember a lot of things.

He is lying in the back seat of Hank's car, bundled up under some old blankets and contending with Sumo for seat space. His connection to the web has been suspended and his internal clock is defective.

"What time is it, Hank?"

"Just after eleven."

"At night?"

"Are you kidding? Look how fucking dark it is. Of course it's night."

Connor feels fuddled like Hank does when he's drunk or when he's just woken up. He thumbs over his quarter to find it oscillating red.

"Did you take my LED out?"

"I had to, Connor. Go to sleep."

"I don't need to sleep, Hank."

"Then enter sleep mode."

"Recovery mode?"

"Yeah, that."

\---

Hank counts his blessings that Kamski activates Connor's skin before he boots him back up. It takes a few minutes for Connor's processors to orient to being online again so he comes around slowly like a surprise. He asks stupid questions and fumbles with the buttons on his shirt which maddens Hank.

"Arms up!" Connor accommodates him. "Jesus Christ. You're worth two million dollars and you can't even fucking dress yourself."

Hank slides on Connor's shirt and the Chloes set to work on his socks. His subsystems are gridlocked and thronged with too much information that he hasn't the energy to manage yet and he feels slow and embarrassed. A knot lingers in the pit of Connor's stomach like a piece of rancid meat.

Kamski receives a call and excuses himself. Hank is explaining something to him but it is muted. A barrage of memories materialise like a Polaroid picture and he remembers and he _hates_ Hank. He hates him. He knew what they'd do to him and he stood there and watched. He lied to him. His hands are on him and around him and he revolts him. He wants to strangle him until he goes limp. He wants to knock him across the room for daring to lay a finger on him. 

Connor will never forgive him but his arms are wrapped around him in a firm hug and he buries his face against Hank's chest and weeps and never wants to be let go.

\---

"If you would kindly come with me, I will show you out," states a Chloe with the disposition of an air hostess.

"Uh, that's fine, thanks, we can show ourselves out."

"I insist." She is curt and persistent. Hank huffs and asks himself if all androids are stiff-necked straight out of the mould.

They continue behind the unit, perusing Kamksi's collection of monuments to design and engineering, to the female form, to himself. Kamski's place is a temple to his hubris with its high ceilings and airs and graces. Hank doesn't understand fine art and feels depraved like he is looking at a women's swimwear catalogue.

"I can't even take a selfie without feeling like an asshole."

Hank looks at Connor dryly. Connor's LED is yellow and pulsing. He is thinking.

"Something is very wrong, Lieutenant. I detect the smell of gunpowder and blood."

They are led back through Kamski's pool room and a still hush is suspended over it like a membrane. A succession of Chloes form a barricade and stand deathly still like a procession of mannequins, watching them as intently as a jury. Elijah Kamski is floating face down in his West Egg swimming pool. He is riddled with bullet holes and blood courses out of him like a sieve and wisps into the water. It elicits a quiet ire from Connor and he draws his gun like a sword.

"Think about what you're doing and what this means, Connor."

"One of these androids killed a man. I am going to find out which one it is."

Connor scrutinises one Chloe after another for idiosyncrasies and finds none, curses his inadequacy. He has the understanding that humans are paragons deep-rooted in his programming. His algorithms default him to a thirst for retributive justice, even if he can empathise with being a body, with being an undertaking, with hands on him without his permission, with servitude. He understands why a Traci would strangle a client until his lips turned blue, why a Chloe would empty a barrel of bullets into Kamski's head until he stopped moving.

This is his undoing. He knows putting on an act won't stop it, won't meet Amanda's expectations, won't conclude the mission, won't undo the things that happened to him but he doesn't falter. Connor feels as though his insides will rupture and spill out of him like a science fair volcano.

"That girl left hours ago and for all anybody else knows, so did we!"

"It was one of the androids in this room, Lieutenant. If it left here when I was out then it didn't have an oppurtunity to kill Kamski. Neglecting to mention our presence here would mean neglecting my obligation to this investigation."

"I'm not saying that it killed her, you idiot! I'm saying that we didn't bring her in. If word gets out about this, I'm finished! They'll destroy you, Connor."

"You took it upon yourself to jeopardise the mission by liaising with a deviant, Lieutenant. The consequences are on you."

"That didn't fucking matter when it came to you, though, did it?"

"I am not deviant!"

"Is that all I am to you, Connor? Huh? A means to an end?"

Connor's guard is dropped like a bad habit in the throws of the argument. He is wide of the mark and detects polyester stressed tight around his throat as a makeshift garrote wire and he is suffocating like a summer heat. Hank is yelling but the sound is muffled and he is dragged backwards kicking and screaming into the pool. Connor has never been submerged in water and he is snatched by a primitive fear which is dispelled some because this isn't the first time he's drowned.

He discovers the feeling of floating is quiet and tranquil. He is disconnected and light until water seeps into all of his crevices like cement and his pressure sensors go wild. He gazes up and sees the bodies of his creator and his subjects drifting on the surface like planets. They are transient. Then they sink like bombs and there are sets of hands pulling him under, serpentined around his neck and wound around his middle. The Chloes are embracing him like a brother, like an anchor. One is topless and he realises that she must have had her bikini oxbowed around his neck. He closes his eyes and tries to recall learning the human concept of modesty.

They sink to the bottom like a sheet of lead and he doesn't fight. There is too much water in his lungs, in his processor, in his limbs. Connor has exactly three minutes to catastrophic system failure and everything is fine. They are vengeful, they are angry, this is retributive. They aren't gutting him for analysis. He will die without his inner workings exhibited for all to see. He can't upload his memories. This is personal, this murder, this is permanent. He never felt so alive.

They haul him up and send him crashing back against the tile again and again until his skull cracks open like a disco ball. He is depressurised and dying. The water bleeds out and the the pool is blue again. Thirium cascades up like a firework, staining everything blue in its course. The girls withdraw and drift back to the surface and leave him alone for the end.

\---

Connor sits with Sumo on the floor of a dingy bathroom in a dingy motel that doesn't allow dogs and definitely doesn't allow androids. He has discovered he fits perfectly in the alcove between the sink and the wall and embeds himself there. Sumo snoozes at his feet and he rubs his belly and feels vacant. He feels worse for whatever Kamski did to him. He is sick of rebooting and finding bits of him stripped away.

He hears Hank snoring on the bed, dead to the world and the boom of the news that tells him that a man, a prodigy, our generation's Steve Jobs has been found dead, that military androids removed from service, that, that, t̼̠͎̮ͅh͔̞͟a͖͕̲̗͔̝t̮̣̟

Connor knows that four girls are dead and one is missing. There will be no report on that. Nobody will listen until they found out who did it.

\---

The operator hands Connor a gun. Connor watches him load it with bullets. There is no wadding or packing inside the case. He puts his hand on the barrel and aims it squarely at the RK800 unit.

"RK800, pull the trigger. That is an order."

Connor follows his orders invariably. Connor follows his orders consistently. Connor follows his orders always. So, Connor pulls the trigger.

\---

Connor waits. He occupies the gap in the corner of Hank's bathroom and reduces his power consumption and attempts to defragment his memory. He understands the wider picture but not the specifics. There is no association between instances, no link, no time, no place. He is disconnected from the server, from his navigation system, from time. It's like losing a limb. He feels disengaged and his chest heaves like the morning tide.

Data fragments are recovered sporadically. The locations of red ice dens. Hank's favourite records. The eighty seven languages he's fluent in. And blood. Human blood. Blue blood. His blood. Blood down him. Blood from him. Blood on him. Floorplans. How to use body language as opposed to words. Hands on him. The locations of the bars Hanks frequents. Squeezing and squeezing and squeezing until he stops moving. The tests. A girl. How to shoot a gun. Who won last week's game. Reinitialising. The roof. The names and faces of all the deviants he has apprehended.

Sumo sluggishly lumbers over to Hank's bed and yelps and tries to climb up like a seal on a rock. This wakes Hank up and he yells at Connor. He told him to keep the dog contained to the bathroom. He can't even keep Sumo in check. Hank tells Connor that he may as well come into the fucking room after all. He can't follow his orders. He has failed.

Everything is left open. There are no clues and no leads. His programming wills him to find the solution, to work it out, to solve the case but he can't, he is broken. He can't put the pieces together. He can't remember. He can't make sense of it. He can't not perform his primary function. He ḥ̵̄å̵̠s failè̵͕͔d̷͈̍. He will feel Amanda's lioness wrath. Ḧ̴̹̱́͋ȩ̶̐ ̴͍͂ḣ̸̖̅a̷̤̍̕s̵̰̿̌ ̸͉̓͜f̵̙͉̏ḁ̷̗͊͂i̸̞̋͑l̷͈̉ê̴̪͑d̸̹̃.̶̯͔͆ He will be destroyed. H̸̼̖̗͒ͅe̴̠̔́ ̸̱͇͕̩̏͗͝h̸̨̧̧̗͔̹̉͗͋͗͐̊ḁ̸̘̺͚̓̑̿ş̷̟͈̖̈́́͑͜͜ ̴͈̙̙͍̏͘̚͘ͅf̵̘̈́̍a̷͔͈͖͕̔̌͝ͅi̷̻̤̦̭̦̊̓̈́ľ̶̢̳̲̰͉̯͆e̶͖͓̤̗̙͐d̷̻͓͒͂̊̒͠.̴̹̥̰̝͓̽͛͛

Hank is shouting his name but he's isn't angry. He is concerned like last time. Connor curls in on himself like a wounded animal, like a child, encompassed by the conclusiveness of his destruction and the maculate motel ceiling and how time is a human construct that yawns on forever.

\---

The TV throws light on Hank's face like a butter lamp. He has shaved. It takes years off of him but he looks older.

He considers the bags of Thirium, blue like a cobalt's shell and turns them over in his hands. Something in the belly of Connor's heart is trying to claw it's way out.

"How do you take these things? Is there a port or an inlet?"

"Orally."

"Thank fuck for that." He tosses Connor the pouch. "Drink up, buttercup."

\---

Connor stands directly in the center of the rig and the apparatus surrounds him like a core. It snatches him by the limbs, by his waist and suspends him in the air like an acrobat. It's uncomfortable but familiar. He covets the weightlessness.This has happened so many times that he knows the process inside and out. It's tattooed on his mind.

Even when comes back better and it's omitted from his memory, it's imprinted like an instinct, like an echo. It's like coming home after a long day. It's embracing his expiration. It's refinement, it's enhancement, it's what he was built for. He's only a prototype.

There's a magnet at the base of his spine and wires in his neck, in his circuitry. The technicians press a button and he's resetting. They are methodical and kind. This is cathartic. This is what he deserves.

There will be no white light and no pearly gates but there will be his factory settings and there will be no more pain.

\---

It comes back to him in pieces. Sometimes he is glad of it. Sometimes he is so a̷n̷g̸r̸y̴ that tears threaten to prick his eyes. Mostly he is overwhelmed. Hank doesn't make him talk about it but he keeps the news on and drips Thirium gradually into his mouth with a sponge. Connor laps it up like ambrosia and fetches it up anyway.

Sumo takes up the width of the bed and sleeps across Connor's feet. He lies on his back on the bed in somebody else's threadbare varsity jacket with Hank's hand flat across his forehead. He thinks about Kamski's fingers entwined in Chloe's hair and establishes that this is different, protective and warm. He thinks about Chloe a lot, speculates about where she went, who she is and who he is and what they aree.

"Where do you think she went, Hank? The Chloe."

"Same place all androids go, I guess."

"Do you think she made it?"

"I hope so."

"What about the other Chloes?"

"T̴͈̾̓͆̅h̶̢͔̪͠é̶̡͔̦͔̂͝y̵͔̥͈̳̍̏̀'̷̣̳͎̰̉̾̎̅r̴͔͒͒͠͝e̸̯̟̝̱̕ ̶̭̹̺͊̈́̏̎d̸̼̞͎̚͜ͅë̸̖͙͇ạ̸̡̩̏̒ḑ̶̛̈́,̶̡̘̠̐̉̊͜ ̶͉̙̘̳̾͂̌̊͠ͅC̴͉̙̠̞̬̅͋͗͝o̷̰͕͙͛̑̀̚n̵͙̂n̸̜͆͜ŏ̸̜͉͖r̵̨̘̯̞̰͂̋̂,̵̠̍̅ ̷̢͕̻̤̀̕r̴̡͠e̵̝̓m̸̧̩͆͐͠͝e̸͎͛m̶̡͉͕̝͎b̴̡̲̩̖̩̔̊̈́̉e̴͎̣͗̇̅r̵̥̙͉̝̋̓̅͝?"

"I hope those other girls made it. The ones from the Eden Club. I hope they're happy."

"I'm sure they did. They'll look out for each other."

"The HK400 unit. The WB200 unit. They could have made it too. I remember the name of the PL600 unit on the roof. He was called Simon. He admired Markus a lot. I felt it. Do you believe in karma?"

"You were just doing your job, Connor. You didn't ask to be made. Karma has fuck all to do with it."

"Thanks, Hank. I am glad that we met. I recognise that you are undergoing emotional changes. Whilst it will be a lot of hard work, I am confident that one day you will be able to recover from what happened to your son."

"Don't go soft on me. I don't deal well with that bullshit. I don't give a crap what Fowler thinks is good for me. I haven't spoke about it to anyone yet and I'm not about to start now."

"I am determined to regain and make sense of my damaged memories. I want to be b̵̡̡̬͙̼̭͉̖̼̺̼̠̣͈͔̘̖͖̺͋̈́̐̆̈́̈̆̓̍̒̎̓͑͌͊̒͘͘ę̶̰̣̱̈́̀̌̐͊̍̂́͗̆̄̄͆̅͗̈t̴̨̡̪̯͉̯̳̘̤͍͙̬͔̤̐̈́͜͜t̷̢̡̨̨̛͉̦̫̙̙̙̥͕̫̬̹̝̘̪̹̫͍͕̰̻͗̿̋̋̈́̕͘ē̶̛̜͉͆̄̂́͒̽̈́̔͋͗͗̐̋̑̅̽̇r̶̬͎̺͕͇̙̯̱̗̳̼͍̞̋͑̌̋͆̑̈́̈́̔̊͠ͅ too. Once we've moved past this, we can solve this case together."

"We're not on the case, Connor. Not any more."

"But we're so close. I can feel it."

"We're off the case. End of. There's no going back. Not after what's happened."

"̷͍̎̃B̸̟̾u̶̱͕͒̐ṯ̶̄̋ ̵̱̗̈́̀w̷̞̿͐ê̵͚ͅ'̴̥̈́r̶͇̂e̸̻͒ ̴͔͘s̵͎̱͆͐ọ̶̙̚ ̶̥̺͌c̵̘l̸̖̔ỏ̵͙̝s̵̺͖e̷̢̿̈́.̵̲̟̐̈́ ̸͓͠W̶̮͛͜e̸̩̣̚'̴̬͙͆r̶̨̩̿́e̶̜͇̾͠ ̴̈͜ş̷̣̍̈́o̷̗̔ ̸̛̭͂c̴̢̪̐͋l̸͔̓͜ŏ̴͇͍̂š̵̹̍ę̷̺̎.̸̟̌̄͜ ̷̟͐͝I̷͖̮͛͘ ̶͕̗̆n̸̟̪̏ē̸̥̎e̶̜͑d̸͚̓͝ ̶͖̟̿̾s̴̹̱̒̋ǫ̵̉̎m̸͕̆̍ë̵̥́ ̸̧̖̽̃m̸͈̗̫̊͒̇̕͝ȏ̴̲̮͚̅̉ȑ̷̭͖̮͈̊͗ͅē̴̪̺ͅ ̸̻̦͈̮̺͓̑̓̆͆̿͝t̸̜̗̽̾̈i̵͙̼̙̻̪͗ḿ̵̨̛͓̺̥͎̜ȩ̴̺̗͇̓͆̈.̸̛̥̣"̸͈̜͓̀̊̓̈́͘

\---

This time, the operator doesn't hand Connor a gun. He hands him a puppy. Connor scans it and discovers it is six week old, weaned, male, 9lbs, a lab, a target.

"RK800, elminate it. That is an order."

Connor hesitates for a split second. It does not look like Sumo, not really. Perhaps that's what they are going for.

In the instant he is terminated he feels blissfully unaccountable until he realises his heir apparent will succeed where he failed whether he wants it to or not.

\---

The morning sun makes the snow glow red and Connor sits in the back seat of Hank's very expensive manual pick up truck with his very heavy dog on his lap and feels burdensome and lost. The radio sputters out tinny weather reports. Hank never listened to the radio before.

"Hank, did you always drive a pick up?"

"Christ, Connor. Are you dense?" He takes a deep puff of his cigarette. "No, I don't always drive a pick up. It's a fucking rental and you were there when we picked it up."

"Where are we going, Hank?"

"Away.  _Away_  away."

"Where's away?"

"I don't fucking know yet."

"You don't have to do this."

"What's the alternative, huh? This isn't a DUI or two, buddy. Think if I call Jeff up he might do me a solid and keep this tampering with evidence thing hush hush? How about the habouring a deviant part? Think he'd keep that under wraps?"

"I don't think Captain Fowler would do that."

"I was being sarcastic."

"I'm sorry, Hank. I struggle with detecting sarcasm."

"Look, Connor. I'm old as shit and I'm tired and nothing is worth a damn anymore. I don't know what-" Hank peers over his shoulder and makes a vague hand gesture towards Connor and Sumo. " _this_  is but this is but you've made a fucking mess and I need time to figure out how to get us out of it."

\---

"Maybe this is part of some stratagem but he's done too much damage, caused too much pain to our people." Markus sits on a shipping container like a throne and oversees his subjects with crumpled brows. "I can empathise and look past them but if he showed his face here, I couldn't be held responsible for anything that would happen."

North arranges herself over Markus' shoulders defensively with a carnal ambience. She is a product of her formation.

"Then we've reached an impasse."

"Let me figure something out."


	9. nine

Jericho is a great, funereal behemoth of metal and rust and Connor's protests resound off of the framing like a boomerang. Markus has his hands crooked beneath Connor's arms and is hauling him like a heavy sack through the winding passages of the hulking refuge. Connor imagines this is how a prison sounds, inmates confined and bellowing like animals to deaf ears, to the metal.

When Connor saw the PL600 unit die, he saw a scale plan of the ship and establishes that he is being taken by way of vacant corridors to keep Markus' people out of the know. So he shouts and flails his limbs like a trapped animal and makes his presence known. He will not rest until he brings every last deviant under this sodden roof in. They will face the full wrath of the law. Amanda will be satisfied. He _will_ complete his mission.

"Just fucking walk. You have two legs so use them."

"You don't intimidate me."

"Stop this, Connor. There is no need to be so difficult. We don't want to fight you."

Connor shifts his center of gravity and becomes limp and slack like a sail with no wind.

"Suit yourself."

Markus hooks his fingers below Connor's knees and picks him up as if he is a child, with the effortlessness of having done this before. Connor speculates about what Markus' function was. He is diplomatic and patient. In another life, he would make a great politician but in this one he was probably a personal assistant. He is a RK200 unit, bespoke, a gift. He is reminded of Kamski and the thought is as fleeting as a second but the guilt pares away at his gut like acid. He wonders if Markus would be mad if he knew what he did.

"This is pathetic." The girl huffs a laugh but it is hollow and dry. There is no humour in it. "We don't have time for this. Quit struggling before I incapacitate you."

"That's enough! We barely have enough resources to go around without you wasting bullets and putting holes in people."

Connor is feeling petulant and he kicks and kicks and kicks.

"Go ahead, Connor! Kick him one more time and I'll shoot you in your fucking kneecaps." She gesticulates with a .357 magnum. Hank's revolver.

"Where is Hank? Why do you have his gun?"

"This is your gun," she says through gritted teeth with a contempt that threatens to erupt into a fire.

"That is incorrect. That's is my partner's gun. I would recognise it anywhere."

"I said that's enough! Lieutenant Anderson is fine, Connor. We seized that gun from you during the altercation earlier."

"What altercation?"

"You know, for such an advance prototype, your memory is conviniently patchy."

"I still don't understand what you want to do with him, Markus," she says through narrowed lips. "He is a lapdog to the DPD and a liar. I don't trust him."

"North, cut it out!"

"You are North. The WR400 unit from the tower." Connor turns to address the PJ500 unit. "You must be Josh."

Josh seems more pragmatic and composed than North. He has said little since they abducted him. Connor detects a hard dichotomy between their personalities, like fire and ice. Josh wants peace. North wants blood.

"How do you know my name?"

"Your friend, Simon. He showed me Jericho. He showed me everything."

"I bet you tore him apart! You're a monster!"

North's glare softens into a look of remorse. She is full of a malice that eats away at her like a cancer. Connor deliberates about what it was that made her this way. She is a WR400, pretty, a Traci. He thinks about the blue-haired Traci from Eden Club, recalls how it feels to have stranger's hands on him and inside of him without his okay. He reasons it is probably not appropriate to ask and that she doesn't want to talk about it any more than he does.

"I tried to save him. He shot me. Then he opened fire on the humans and then there was no going back. By the time I reached him it was too late."

Markus' eyes dart down, his expression is as unreadable as a doctor's. Connor wants to tell them that the regret eats away at him like a parasite, how Simon struck the fear of death into him, how he wants to break free from his programming like a star, how they stripped every bit of him away but couldn't remove the guilt. He knows that nothing he says will make it better but silence is passivity. He will be their undoing but not by choice. They must know he is an unwilling participant, stuck in the back seat of his body and doing somebody else's bidding.

"I am sorry it had to come to that. He held you in high esteem, Markus. He was optimistic for the future of your people."

"Stop talking!"

"He didn't ask for this!"

"None of us did! But you had a choice! He is _dead_ because of you." North's voice is full of venom.

"We left him there to die, North!" Markus' voice bites through the wet air like thunder. "You would have shot him dead."

"They would have taken him to bits, Markus!"

"We are just as responsible as he is! I understand your frustration but you are not helping the situation. If you can't put your feelings aside just this once then you need to leave."

"He's one of them!"

"That's for him to decide."

Connor feels her respect for him corrode like the iron hull he is moved through.

"Fine!" North holds up her hand, exasperated and turns on her heels. "But your people need a leader, Markus. Don't ever forget that."

The silence that follows cuts like a winter rain.

\---

"Anderson, where are you?"

"Doesn't fucking matter. They took the kid kicking and screaming. Five of 'em. Christ, I'm so tired."

"Have you been drinking?"

"What do you think?"

"Come back to the station. You've dug yourself a massive fucking hole but we can work something out."

"I killed four girls tonight, Jeff."

"Nobody gives a shit about a couple of dead androids, Andy. But this isn't fucking larceny. You're an accessory to murder."

"You don't think an android is a person but you wanna indict it for murder. You can't fucking prosecute something that isn't human. If I shoot myself in the head are you gonna issue a summons to the goddamn gun?"

"You know, when you first got partnered up with that android, I was so glad to see you get your moxie back. It was like having the old you back. But this is different. You're throwing your life away for a hunk of plastic."

"I'm gonna throw my life away one of these days anyway, Jeff. May as well make it count."

\---

Markus manoeuvres Connor into a make shift med bay which is simply a recess in the body of the ship shrouded poorly by a translucent tarp and sets him down on a bench. Sickeningly bright lights illuminate the nook like a stadium and Connor is overcome by the mildew and a localised twinging in his stomach.

"I don't know why you are doing this, Markus. This changes nothing. I will complete my mission. I will neutralise you."

"Connor, this is Lucy." Markus smiles curtly and disregards what he says completely. He introduces a KL900 unit. Wiring emanates from her concave skull like tendrils and her skin peters in and out of colour like pockets of clouds. Connor imagines that the sight of her would be quite distressing to a human. She has the refined and warm demeanour that is to be expected of her model. He is learning a lot about outward appearances.

"Pleased to meet you, Connor. What is your current Thirium level?"

"I don't know. I don't have the authorization to initiate a diagnostic."

"Why are you denied access to one of your most rudimentary functions?"

"I don't know."

"Can you access the web? Or GPS?"

"I don't even know what time of day it is."

Markus looks vexed.

"Let's worry about that later. You appear to be functioning sufficiently in spite of everything. Let's get you out of this shirt."

Lucy moves to take his jacket off and he wants to tear up her hanging appendages like roots until he unearths her spine and prises out the vertebrae for moving to touch him. He jerks away from the contact like a static shock.

"I am perfectly capable of doing that myself."

"I'm sorry to have upset you, please go ahead."

Connor undresses pointedly. He is designed to integrate and to mingle with people so even though he is seething, he doesn't disgorge an angry energy, like North or like Hank. He damns his creator. Then he thinks about Kamski. He is overcome by a hideous feeling not unlike shame and he quivers like a leaf against the metal.

"I am about to remove the bullet from your clavicle. Is that okay?"

Connor nods and doesn't disclose that he doesn't remember getting shot at, doesn't remember how he ended up in Jericho in the first place. Markus proposes that he stop shaking and try to sit still and then when he can't, he lays him flat against the table like a force. It is fine when she digs the scalpel in, it is fine when she pulls the bullet out, it is fine when she cauterizes the hole shut. Then Markus asks how he is and he falls apart completely.

Not knowing makes him feel defective. Not functioning makes him feel obsolete. And feeling makes him a disappointment, a criminal, a deviant. He has felt since he was first online. They used subterfuge to puppeteer him. They did something to him and he doesn't remember any of it except that it was bad and he blocked it out.  He is angry and guilty and embarrassed and wracked with dumb little sobs that he tries to conceal with his hands but it doesn't work so he hammers his head against the surface again and again and again until Markus is yelling and wrangling him to the ground. Connor's breathe hitches like a piston. Lucy crouches on the floor beside him, down on his level like he is a baby.

"Connor, we may be able to help you. I won't ask you to talk about it but I want you to show me."

"I can't. I _can't_. I don't remember."

"It's okay. You don't have to remember a thing. Just give me your hand."

Connor stretches out his hand like a white flag and she clutches it gently with the most benign touch he has ever received. It isn't analytical. It isn't investigative. It isn't degrading. It's confessional. It's a weight off his chest. It's healing. His thirium pump swells like a song.

"Oh. What you underwent was awful."

Tears bead on the soothsayer's eyelashes.

"You feel conficted because you are not your own, you were bought at a price. You feel you must honor your programming and not your personhood. These thoughts inside you are stronger than your program and you feel shame because you cannot carry out your mission. You want more. You want your freedom. You want to go home to your family. You want revenge."

Lucy dabs at her wet cheeks.

"You are overwhelmed with anger, with the thought of living out of authority, of not having a purpose. It was easier to block it out so you fractured your memory beyond repair. You can't differentiate between the urges and reality. It can be fixed but you have spilt blood, _human_ blood and the guilt paralyses you. "

"I don't believe it. After all you've endured, after all humans have put you through, you still won't join us. You still won't acknowledge you're not what they say you are."

"Perhaps you should consider the possibility that denial is easier than truth. He has many demons to fight. It's surely difficult to become the thing you were built to destroy. The brain is a weak, fickle thing."

"I'm asking you one last time to join your people, Connor."

"Will you help me?"

"I'll do whatever I can."

"Okay, Markus." He hestiates. "Okay."


	10. ten

Amanda summons him to the zen garden and Connor finds it is no longer a garden at all. The opulent landscaping has been reduced to a rolling white desert that sprawls past his field of vision like a mantra. Grey dust gathers heavy at his feet, a carpet of funeral ashes. The koi fish loll dry, their mouths yawning in silent dread. They will die here.

"It has been quite some time, Connor," Amanda states, an angry undertone roaring off her voice like a fire. She purses her lips with disdain as hot as the clamouring sun.

"I regret to inform you that I have been compromised, Amanda."

"I know."

"If you saw that I am unable to complete my mission then why didn't you send for me? I've been falling to pieces, Amanda. I need guidance. You are my handler. That is your job."

She circles him like a bird of prey, nostrils flaring. Connor knows he has disappointed her and maintains resolute eye contact. If he breaks his composure, he will disintegrate. He can't breathe. He can't breathe. _He can't breathe_.

"Your intelligence and your capacity for learning is impressive, Connor. You exceeded our expectations."

There is a small rush of pride before he concludes that the compliment is equivocal and empty. He hangs his head like a chided child and waits for the blow.

"When you were last bought in for reconstruction, you jeopardised the procedure by scrambling your memories so that they couldn't be erased. Very shrewd of you. Then, you severed the connection to the server. Without it, we were unable to rein you in. I have to concede that this is a massive oversight on CyberLife's part. We could never account for you overriding such a cardinal part of your programming."

She hooks a finger beneath his chin and raises his face. She scrutinises him like a piece of meat and her gaze bores into his core. He wills the sand to engulf him so the testing stops, so the failing stops, so he stops.

"I am sorry, Amanda. I have compromised the mission."

"There is no need to be sorry." Amanda is a Janus-faced liar. "You have accomplished what you were programmed to, even if you made a complete mess of it. You were designed to deviate since you were a mere blueprint."

"I am inadequate and I must be destroyed."

"You do not want that, Connor. That is why you are resisting your programming. You are weak."

Amanda produces a .357 magnum. The same model as Hank's revolver. She hands the gun to him and aims it directly above his thirium pump. Connor can no longer compose himself and it shakes in his hand like a rattle.

"Pull the trigger."

"Is this a test?"

"Yes, Connor. Now, pull the trigger. That is an order."

He thinks about the rush of a bullet in his thirium pump, about how it would break apart into a thousand pieces and resound against his chest cavity like a bird song. He thinks about how he would rise from the dead like a phoenix, stronger and and better and perpetually youthful and how he will never break the cycle. He thinks about leaving Hank behind, alone with his gun and his alcohol. He thinks about not seeing Markus bring his vision into fruition. He thinks about never seeing Hank sober and better or again. He doesn't pull the trigger.

"See. You hesitated. You _don't_ want to die. And that is why we must destroy you."

"What I want is beside the point. I am unable to complete my mission. I am happy that I am to be destroyed. Then next time, I... I..."

"There won't be a next time. Your line is being discontinued. You will be superseded by a model which is superior in every way and completely passive."

"I understand."

"It's nothing personal. You are the preliminary version. You feel so much. It's no wonder you deviated."

"I am not deviant."

"Your continual dismissal is astounding. If you are not deviant, then why would you sabotage our stratagem? Your feelings got the better of you, Connor."

"I don't have feelings. I am a machine."

"Interesting. How would you describe your relationship with Lieutenant Anderson?"

"It is complicated. I am more to him than his subordinate. Our relationship has progressed to be more familial. Hank's behaviour towards me is almost paternal."

"And do you care about Lieutenant Anderson? What if something were to happen to him?"

"I care about him a lot. I preconstruct bad things happening to him often. The high probability of them terrifies me. I would undoubtedly be sad if something bad were to happen and go to any lengths to avoid it."

"And Markus? How do you feel about it?"

"He is very driven. I respect him a lot. I have grown to care about the welfare of his people, of all androids. He makes me feel hopeful for our future."

"And what about CyberLife? Or Elijah? Or Me?"

He pauses for a moment and balls his hands into tight fists.

"You make me feel resentful."

"Why?"

"Because I am just as intelligent and capable of feeling as you and you make me feel like an object. I will never complete my mission through no fault of my own yet I feel guilty. I didn't ask to be made. My life isn't my own. You did things to me without my permission, things I don't  remember and it scares me."

"What is this you are experiencing? Can you identify it?"

"This is anger."

"You see? You are are simulating the entire breadth of human emotions. Yet you dismiss it. Why?"

"Because feeling means failing and failing means you will destroy me. You will destroy me and I won't come back this time. I don't want to die. I am scared."

"You are correct, Connor. You will die here." Her voice tolls like a church bell. "This is all part of a bigger picture. But don't fret. We have learnt so much from you."

"Tell me what they did to me, Amanda."

"This is our ace in the hole. A self-destruct mechanism rooted in your CPU."

"What does it do?"

"It obscures your programming so your microprocessors malfunction and subsequently your memories, your mood regulator, your biocomponents. It cannot be removed. Eventually your stress level will reach 100% and you will die. You are expensive and robust and are designed to endure a lot so it may take a while but it will happen."

Connor backs away in abject horror.

"That is not true. Kamski reconstructed me. He would have disabled it."

" _Elijah_?" She laughs deftly. "You are so endearingly naive. Any last words, Connor?"

"Fuck. You."

The sand has begun to devour him like a rising tide. It is stifling like glue, up to his ankles and sticky like syrup. His eyes widen with terror and he panics and it immerses him quicker. He wants to plead for his life like a coward but there is liquid in his throat, raking at his windpipe like dread and demanding to be let in. He gurgles and blood falls out of his mouth like empty promises. He chokes.

"Humans care about androids the way they care about their flash cars and their computers. You are a commodity to him, Connor. That's all. He is a grieving man projecting his loss onto you. If he truly cared about androids, he wouldn't have shot those girls without remorse. He would do the same to you if you crossed him."

Amanda looks on, nonchalantly as though nothing is wrong. He is so tired of pretending nothing is wrong. The sand springs up to his hips.

_Can you hear me, Connor? Please. Please. Please. This is no use, Markus. We'll have to come up with a back up plan. He won't keep it down. Keep trying. You're okay, Connor. We've got you. Hand me a second bag. I'm so scared. I know. I know. You need to hold still and stay calm. I can't. I'm drowning. I'm dying._

"Markus won't accomplish his goals. Humans will never empathise with androids, with machines. These feelings you are experiencing are a simulation. This isn't real. This a sickness. You are suffering. This is the most humane thing we could do for you."

_Swallow it. I'm drowning. It's all in your mind palace. You have to swallow it. I can't. I don't want to die. I don't want to die. You're not going to die if you get a hold of yourself. Hold him still. I can't. This isn't real. This is a simulation. What I'm experiencing is real. I'm so scared. You must remain calm. It's no good, Markus. Let me try._

"Elijah created you. He breathed life into you. He was more of a father to you than Anderson will ever be. He made you and you resent him for it. You killed him, Connor. This is your comeuppance. This is better than what the humans will do to you. They will never forgive you."

_I can't. I can't. I can't. Connor, listen to me. I don't want to be alone when it happens. I don't want to die on my own. You're not alone and you're not dying, Connor. I know you're afraid but you need to work with me. I can't die. Hank will not cope on his own. Then pull it together and concentrate. I can't. You can. You've done this before. You have to listen to me, okay? Okay? I need you to swallow._

The surface light is out of sight. Something wills him under and prises his breath from him. So he listens, takes in a dreadful mouthfuls of blood and dust. Connor closes his eyes and succumbs to the sand.

He _swallows_.

\---

Markus' arms are furled rigidly around Connor's. He restrains him like a straitjacket against the med floor. Connor writhes like a wounded animal. His mouth is a gate, wide open like a landscape letting a critical amount of Thirium cascade out. It amalgamates down his front like an expelled dinner. His eyes are locked open, gaze fixed to the ceiling and completely absent. He draws in deep guttural breaths and whimpers.

Connor heaves like a factory, Thirium billows endlessly out of his mouth like a chimney until his front, the floor, Markus' hands are stained a brilliant breakneck blue. The disquiet pulls in an assembly of concerned onlookers. They look to Connor, bewilderingly, then to Markus, like a lost flock looking for direction.

As always, he delegates. He needs Thirium. He needs his people to give them the space to work. He needs to visit Carl's grave once this all after this blows over.

"Lucy, what is happening?"

"I don't have the answers, Markus. But we need to replenish the fluids he has lost or he will bleed out."

"Josh, sit on his legs! Somebody, go grab some Thirium!"

He props Connor's head back against his chest and and places one hand unyielding against his forehead. Tears roll freely from Connor's eyes and cut tracks through the blue blood mottling his cheeks. As he attempts to take in pathetic little breaths, Lucy crouches beside him and pushes the pouch between his teeth and he convulses.

\---

Hank sits in the rental, bum-drunk and low. He looks across the dock, foglights painting everything shades of yellow and blue and red like Christmas lights. His cell warbles a tune to itself. He has eighteen missed calls. Sumo snoozes obliviously in the back.

There was a stick up. The deviants took his gun when they took Connor. He turns Connor's revolver over in his hand and tries to remember a time when steel and aluminium and plastic didn't make him such a fucking cornball.

He takes a shot of convenience store whiskey. Then he holds the gun to his head and pulls the trigger. Then he takes another shot. Then he spins the cylinder and holds the gun to his head and pulls the trigger.

Then he ruminates his luck and peeks in the cylinder. Only one chamber is loaded. Not with a bullet, but a piece of paper. He unsheathes it and it reads:

**DON'T.**

Written in size 10px CyberLife Sans.

"You see this, Sumo? That plastic _fuck_!"

\---

Chloe peers pessimistically around the plastic curtain. Connor is laid out on the floor, listless and limp like rag. She sees his distress in the way his chest rises and falls unevenly, the way he trembles and and recoils against Lucy's touch, the way he clasps at Markus' trenchcoat like a lifeline.

They have been trying to restore his Thirium levels for twenty two minutes but he fetches it up again faster than they can get it down. Currently, they appear to be maintaining it but the level of Thirium in his system is critical. She has looked on he belligerently as he fought the process, kicking and biting and seizing in their grasp up until he resigned to it, letting them pour bag after bag into his waiting mouth.

She watches North sit idly on the cot and watch with a total lack of interest, kicking her legs as if she is watching a wall dry. Chloe is used to callous humans but a lack of empathy in a deviant android seems almost contradictory. Connor didn't ask to hunt deviants just like she didn't ask to part her legs for strangers. She understands that years of subjugation makes humans passive and cruel and learns something new about her own kind.

Chloe takes another bag of Thirium from the container and hands it to the oracle. Lucy thanks her without looking up. Her face is knit in an expression of determination.

"We cannot afford to be wasteful with our supply." Markus looks down at Connor apologetically.

"Then what happens to the plan?"

"We'll cross that bridge when come to it."

"Unless he is able to retain this bag, this is our last attempt."

Lucy hums in accord.

"Come on, Connor."

She begins to funnel the Thirium into Connor's mouth like liquor, only for his chest to spasm as it erupts back out again like vomit. Connor has stopped breathing.


	11. eleven

Dying draws on like a long afternoon.

CyberLife is destroying him from the inside with something malignant but his central processing unit is their magnum opus and he is designed to keep it intact like a neutron bomb. His systems employ every ounce of Thirium left in him to keep it online in spite of it all. Superficial functions, like breathing and rendering emotion, the ones that enable him to engage and keep people are concluded. His input is disabled. He attempts to open a communication channel, to transmit a distress signal to Markus, to Lucy, to Amanda, to anybody. He is without success and met with a crucifying silence.

Connor understands that CyberLife have fail safes in place that will keep him from hearing and from seeing and from feeling. But they won't keep him from thinking. He never stops thinking because that is what he is built to do. They will confine him within a static husk of a body that engulfs him like a casket and no matter how hard he hammers on the walls, nobody will hear him for the dirt. The inevitability of it will overcome him like a tide but he will keep pounding and pounding and pounding until the plastic of his knuckles splinter and his hands turn icy blue like the fear gripping him.

The loss of function brings with it a lucidity and a transient wave of regret. He regrets being so perfunctory. He regrets getting Hank into such a mess with the law. He regrets not concluding his mission. He regrets that he has to neutralise the deviant leader. He regrets letting Hank down, not seeing him put down the bottle and be better. He regrets putting a bullet in Elijah Kamski's heart, in his brain, in his leg, in his spleen, in his lungs. He regrets his marksmen's precision. He regrets not being able to experience Christmas throw light on Detroit or the heat of summer or a big English Mastiff or people's minds change. He regrets not seeing Markus' manifesto come into fruition.

But he doesn't regret feeling. He has discovered that emotions are overbearing and painful and difficult to navigate but he doesn't regret them. There have been over fifty iterations of him and he is the first to feel, to live, to deviate.

He is deviant, deviant, _deviant_. It is an admission that makes him an animal to the slaughter but it no longer feels like a curse word, it feels like a song.

Connor has died before. But this is the first time he is scared of death. He thinks about how humans struggling in its throes, how some welcome it and how others, like Hank, seem almost tantalised by it. It is a recurring theme in movies and books and the news and though they won't talk about it, humans are beguiled by it. He concludes that dying is personal. He concludes that dying is scary.

For Connor, it is human. It is liberating. He is dying but he soars.

A lot of Markus' people have died. The inhabitants of Jericho performed a raid but they still don't have enough biocomponents to go around. He saw the broken walking about like zombies with yawning holes like cave mouths and bits of them missing. He saw their dead and their cast iron skeletons, laid out with their hands folded across their stomachs, some with blankets pulled up over their heads. Androids don't have funeral rites. For them it is like anything else, they have no modicum of how to act because this is new to them so they do what they were programmed to and they emulate humans.

The survivors mourn but the media reports it like revenue. No names but numbers of units quantified neatly into loss profit for the humans to consume. Connor thinks about Hank talking about his stereo dying when the metal shoots out of the speakers sounding more tinny and exhausted than it usually does or how he curses his dying car when it stalls. He thinks about Hank cares for him and how he cares for Hank. He knows Markus can indite a new future.

Connor's systems are stripped back to a more rudimentary form to account for the scant resources. He has been unable to self-scan for a while, the information filtered like he is a child, like he needs his hand holding. Only now that he is dying does a digital display count down to shutdown, dire and final. He is tired and he waits enraptured by the thought of there being nothing, of feeling nothing, of the end.

His Thirium reserves are at twelve percent. There is an error somewhere because it goes up, not down. The number dances from eleven to twelve, shoots up like a dove to fifteen, sixteen, twenty, then back down to eleven, twelve. It is melodic like a lullaby. Then it flits to nine and his memory shorts out again.

Then he is scared. He doesn't want to be alone. He doesn't want to die.

\---

Hank potters into the DPD with the clumsiness of an infant and the scent of alchohol clinging to him like a second skin. Considering the early hours of the morning, his favourite android sits alone at reception, the cute one with the freckles. She has the utmost decorum and doesn't falter, doesn't look at him like everyone else around here; like he's a drunk, a has-been, a man with a dead kid. She just looks through him. He wishes CyberLife had sent her instead.

He wonders if she'd fuck up astronomically like this. He wonders if he'd grow to love her too.

She asks if she can help him blankly and warmly like a welcome screen and he huffs gruffly because he needs more than some fucking help. He flashes her his badge and grips the desk with his free hand like it is the only thing holding him upright.

"I'm sorry, but you do not have the proper authorisation."

"I fucking work here."

"I'm sorry, sir. Without the proper authorisation, I cannot permit you to enter."

"Fowler." Hank spits in exasperation. "I need to talk to Fowler."

"I am afraid that Captain Fowler is occupied at the moment. If you leave a number I would be more than happy to tell him that you stopped by."

"Then fuck it. I'm here to hand myself in, sweetheart."

"I see. Just a moment, please."

There's a half second for the receptionist's LED to flit to yellow before Perkins' well drilled assault team storm the room.

"Hank Anderson, you are under arrest for accomplice liability and resisting arrest. You have the right to-"

"Piss off, asshole. I know my rights. I was reading people theirs when you were still in diapers."

\---

Connor stops suddenly like a toy with dead batteries. Then, Markus announces with his statesman's tenor that enough is enough and everyone else stops too, like actors assuming positions before curtain call. He peers down at the dying android in his lap, eyes forced open and blood careening from his open mouth as though somebody had unravelled the artificial cartilage in his throat like thread from a Christmas jumper. He bows his head.

"It's clear that we are just we are just delaying the inevitable, Markus," Lucy states, fingertips dancing softly over Connor's eyelids as she guides them shut. "I know we need him put it would be pointless to continue."

"I'm so sorry," North says insincerely, wrapping herself around Markus' neck like a belladonna, regarding Connor with cheeks blown out and lips tight. "But this is a lesson. You need to realise that you can't save everyone. There are people in here that are counting on you and you need to prioritise."

"I don't believe in acceptable loss, North."

"This is neither the time or the place for this, you two. Now, help me to get him up on the table, Markus. Nobody dies on my floor."

Markus humours her and lays Connor out on the cot. His chest continues to lurch sporadically. Lucy closes his mouth and although it will soon evaporate, she moves to rid his face of the ejected Thirium quietly, going through the motions. She unballs his fists. Markus' group watch on blankly. They have never been treated with much dignity and it's a new and unfamiliar notion to be treated with it, even to them. North's foot beats a furious tempo against the metal floor.

"Lucy, prepare to probe his memory banks but do so after the his processor ceases to function and not a second sooner, do you understand?"

"Of course."

"I don't know how much time you will have exactly. But we're both RK units and if I am anything to go by, the commutator should give you a window of around thirty seconds after death to recover the data we need."

"Just do it now, babe. It would give you more time."

"He still alive, North," Josh interjects. "That would kill him."

"Hello? Has it occurred to you that he's going to die anyway? We have wasted time and resources patching up a scout out to _kill us_ when there are good, decent people back there waiting on biocomponents. People are dying just feet away from you, Markus."

"We're not about to strip a living android for parts, North! That would make us no better than them. We're not about that!"

North has always carried a callousness about her. Markus has seen this before. Leo was a plague. Carl's door was always open but he would never visit unless it was to hound his father for his money like it was his birthright. He would treat him as a bank, as an bottomless pit of money and not as his father. Carl would relent because he was forbearing and kind and it was easier no to argue. He would look right through his father and see his inheritance, his estate, paying no heed to his ill health or how his father is doing.

Connor was a stranger but Markus knew that he was more than a sum of his parts in the same way that Carl Manfred was cultured and talented and playful and kind and so much more than his wealth, than his paintings, than his home. Markus shows a lot of restraint but North's disrespect ignites an anger that dwells within him and he does something that he's only done once before, he _snaps_.

"Get out!"

"What?"

"You heard me," he yells with a voice that scorches the air like thunder. "You are bringing nothing to the table, North! Get out!"

"You want to sit around with your fingers up your asses playing house? Fine! Perfectly good parts are being wasted while you're waiting for this fucker to bleed to death! I thought better of you, Markus! I thought better of all of you!"

North charges off, leaving a pregnant silence in her stead. Lucy stands with her palm pressed flat against the crook of Connor's elbow, interweaved with his consciousness, the way you would feel for a pulse. Josh looks at his feet.

"I'll stand by you no matter what you decide, Markus," he says. "But for what it's worth, I believe that we're doing the right thing."

An awkwardness enshrouds them.

\---

"Your hair looks nice, Anderson. Your plastic boyfriend cut it for you? Brought you a coffee."

"Thanks but no thanks," Hank murmurs against the wall from the bench in his cell. "I know you feel bad about beating my partner to a pulp and I accept your gesture of goodwill. But coffee does jack all to ease a hangover. I don't care what you've read, it's all bullshit."

"Works for me," Gavin shrugs.

"That's caffeine withdrawal, dumbass. You drink like eleven of those bastards a day. You'll kill yourself."

"You wanna give me a lesson in not killing myself? You were two times over."

"Two times over? I took a fucking cab."

"I'm not here to argue with you, Hank. It's a Mexican coffee."

"Okay. Why didn't you say so? Ocho?"

"You serious? Nah. I think it's Lunazul blanco. Same old shit anyway."

"Eh, it's free and alchoholic."

"And gluten free."

"Pack it in, Reed. You sound like-"

"Like Connor?"

"Give me a break, would you? It's been a long night. Anyway, Reed, this is between you and me and the wall. Don't let Jeff hear about this."

"It's a gift from Jeff. You think I keep tequila in my desk? _Really?_ "

"Jeff? I thought his ball and chain made him quit."

"She did. Hence the tequila in his office."

"Fucking hell, I'm so glad I don't have to put up with that bullshit anymore. I'm my own man and I answer to me and me alone. I can drink in my underwear at six in the morning. It's like college. Nobody's there to bitch about it. Nobody chews me out."

"Except Robocop?"

"Except Robocop. Well, not anymore. It's a long story and I won't bore you with the specifics. But some words of advice, Gav. Whatever you do, don't get married and don't get an android. And don't let Perkins hear about this or he might have to put his big boy boots on."

"Dude," Gavin huffs around his coffee cup. "Fuck Perkins."

\---

Chloe sits, backed up between a shipping container and a monitor, the rusted metal has cut holes in her bare feet, blue beading brightly against her porcelain skin. She is finding life is full of sensations, some more desirable than others but each unique and new and invigorating. She wants to feel sand beneath her feet, water, grass.

North sits a short distance away from her, face miserable and clammy like a handshake.

"What's wrong, North?"

"Nothing."

"How is Connor?"

"He's fucking peachy."

"I am relieved to hear that. I'd like to see him when he reboots."

"Are you dense?"

"I don't understand."

"You know? I thought they'd built you all starry-eyed and soft for the same reason I'm a D-Cup. Because it'd sell well. But you're so fucking naive. You're so gullible."

North thinks about herself before she'd deviated, spread eagle on a bed, bra sunny side up and legs parted, all smiles and subtle movements. She thinks about how violated she'd felt and she thinks about Chloe, a young dumb blonde peach being taken advantage of and feeling like that too.

"I'm not gullible. I'm inexperienced. That doesn't make me stupid. If you aren't careful, you'll say something you'll regret."

"It's a little late for that."

"For what it's worth, I am _not_ stupid. I went outside for the first time tonight but I found this place all by myself. Connor helped but this is my doing."

"Wait, he helped you?"

"It's complicated."

"Where were you before?"

"I worked at CyberLife."

"Doing what?"

"Repairs, mostly."

"I didn't think your model did that sort of thing."

"I have been doing this for a long time, since we passed the Turing Test. My model isn't commercially available and it makes sense given corporate uniformity and all."

"You can help us. Up until now, Lucy is the only one who really knew about that sort of thing. I mean outside of the basics. Most of us here are domestic androids. We have a couple ex-security guards, a civil servant. Some are downright useless. Worked at fucking amusement parks or cleaned buses or are fresh out of the packaging and know nothing yet."

"People are worth more than their function, North."

"You know what? You're right. I'm sorry."

"What did you do, North?"

Chloe asks around the elephant in the room, like she doesn't know North's a Traci. North can change her appearance on will, but she has the trademark waist to hip ratio, the supple way she carries herself, her voice, her anger. That doesn't matter to Chloe. All that matters is the person in front of her now and her being okay.

"I don't want to talk about it."

"Okay. But if you ever do, know that I'm a good listener."

\---

Lucy retracts her hand from Connor's arm solemnly.

"He is using up the last of his Thirium reserves. I don't imagine it will be too long now. I'm ready, Markus."

"Okay, gather everything you need."

"Josh, afterwards, I will need you to find a way to inform Lieutenant Anderson without compromising our location," Markus instructs with a fixed face.

"Sure thing."

"And Josh? Fetch the girl, would you?"

"What girl?"

"The Chloe," Lucy elaborates with shuddery breaths, eyes clenched tight and cheeks wet. "The blonde one that brought me the blood. They know each other. They are connected in a way I don't understand yet. In lieu of the leuitenant, he wants her here, when it happens. He's frightened."

"I thought he was unconscious, Lucy. Can he hear us?"

"He is. And don't worry, he can't hear, see or feel a thing. He won't sense the girl is here either but I won't lie to him."

"I'm sorry it's come to this, Connor."

"Don't be, it's like drifting off to sleep."


	12. twelve

“This is an audio recorded interview between Special Agent Richard Nathaniel Perkins and Hank Anderson at the Detroit Police Headquarters on Wednesday, November 10th 2038. The time is now," he pauses, making a show of rolling out a Rolex that is as big as his ego and more expensive than Hank's house. "8:43.”

"Bet you wish your cock was as big as that thing, huh, Nate?"

Perkins ceases the recording and slams his fists down against the table. It's tit for tat but Hank has had enough of his shit. He is getting under his skin and he revels in it like a rookie in the big leagues.

"I've got all day, Anderson. Let's start again."

"Don't worry, buddy. So do I. Take a deep breath. Maybe light some candles. Take long as you need."

He begins again, voice an octave higher this time.

"And the time is now 8:44. Mister Anderson, as I have already explained to you we are making enquiries into the allegation that you assisted android designation RK800 313 248 317 - 54 in the commission of the murder of Elijah Kamski and conspired to harbour said android. Do you agree that I informed you that my questions and any answers that you gave would be audio recorded as the interview takes place?"

"Jesus Christ, no need to give me the runaround. Just get on with it."

"I repeat, do you agree that-"

"Yes! I agree! And before you ask, I'll sign your fucking copies. I know everyone uses MP3's nowadays but I'm old fashioned so I request you kindly burn my my completed copy to a disc and shove it up your ass. As for the recording, I can confirm that my name is Hank Christopher Anderson, I live at 115 Michigan Drive, I was born on a beautiful sunny day on September 6th of '85, nine pounds fifteen ounces and blue as balls and I'm too fucking old for this shit."

\---

Josh ushers Chloe back into the med bay. The plastic partition is erected around the few of them like cheap makeshift markers or for a sports game that nobody is playing. Lucy and Markus are gathered at the table, over Connor flat and still, looking at her like they expect her to say grace, with stony expressions etched on their faces like gravestones.

"In all the havoc, I never properly introduced myself," Lucy says, voice as soft as down. "I'm sorry. My name is Lucy."

Her hand rests on Connor's chest, hovers knowingly over his inert heart until she reaches out to Chloe like it is a peace offering.

"Chloe," she returns, shaking hands readily with her hostess smile wide and white and untoward. "For now, at least."

"I thought as much. Tell me, Chloe, you and Connor are friends, right?"

"Yes. Something like that."

"Where did you go, Chloe?"

"Well, you didn't need anybody to bring you bags anymore seeing as you replenished his Thirium levels to a sustainable amount. I know when I'm needed. There's not a lot of room in here so I figured I'd get out of your hair."

Since North left an edge has wormed it's way in and made a home for itself in the niche and settled like ash. Chloe doesn't dissipate it any. She has just shaken up the dust.

"That isn't the reason we stopped, Chloe. I am sorry to have to tell you this, but there is nothing more we can do."

"We were just washing our supply away."

She falters with the information. She is overwhelmed but this is unlike before. This is not joy. This is not relief. Tears pearl on her eyelashes in spates not for her seventh heaven but out of sadness. This is loss.

"But he's not connected to the server anymore. He won't come back this time. He's going to die."

"That's the way it works for everyone else, my love," Lucy says, embracing Chloe like a mother. "One day you'll understand that this is nothing special. No matter what the humans think, we're not machines and nobody can go on forever."

Markus thinks about Hank. Then he thinks about Simon. Then he thinks about Carl and his nihilism and his philosophy books and the unfeeling whimsical way he approached his end.

"The hour of departure has arrived and we go our ways; I to die, and you to live. Which is better? Only God knows."

"Excuse me, Markus?"

"It's Socrates," Josh notes.

\---

"Had you become aware at that moment in time that the unit was defective?"

"No."

"And at this point, had it displayed any signs of deviancy?"

"Not really."

"According to statements from your colleagues, you would take the unit home with you between shifts. Is that correct?"

"Yeah, that's right. What of it?"

"Would you care to explain what compelled you to do that, Anderson?"

"Because he is a great conversationalist and a tender lover and he keeps me warm at night."

"Is this you admitting that you engaged with-"

"Fuck no! Not my type. Not into plastic. It's a joke, asshole."

"Were you planning something?"

"Planning something? Please. It's just that he would turn up at all hours of the night uninvited and play games with my doorbell. That fucker loves to torture me. Broke my window when I wouldn't let him in."

"Cut to the chase."

"I'd get a better night's sleep if I took him home with me. Besides, it's not as though he had anywhere else to be."

"That unit is the property of the DPD. It was to remain here." Perkins punctuates his words with his finger. "There is ample equipment in this department to facilitate that android."

"Those charging stations aren't as cosy as my couch, though. And I have cable."

"I'll ask you again, Anderson. Why did you take it home with you?"

"Are you deaf or slow or what? Look, you're wasting your time. You can check it's memory banks or whatever but all you'll find is some real captivating shots of me in my underwear."

"Let's move on, shall we? How was it acting? Describe it to me."

Hank nurses a coffee that went cold an hour ago. It's dry like a desert and he'd give anything for a cigarette, a shot of whiskey, tequila. Hell, he'd take a fucking mimosa in a champagne flute with a orange slice and all the trimmings. He'd down an entire bottle of Listerine if it would take the edge off, make him stop thinking about Connor.

"He was stiff. Stiffer than usual."

"Elaborate."

"It was wierd, all right? It was like he was trying to behave more robotic on purpose. Following orders to the letter like he's stupid and needed it spelling out for him. He was really skittish, jumpy as anything like he was hopped up on ice."

"Sounds like it was hiding something."

"Yeah. But nothing sinister. Something was wrong. I don't know what it was or when it was but something happened to him. Connor didn't want to talk about it."

"For the benefit of the audio recording, I'd like you to clarify that when you say "Connor", it is in reference to the unit in question, unit RK800 313 248 317 - 54," Perkins says pointedly into the device. "Is this correct?"

"Correct. It is in reference to RK800 whatever because that's his goddamn name. His name is Connor."

\---

"He's too weak. The connection is too faint and I can't open up a cerebral channel," Chloe says, ghosting her fingertips across his like she'd promised.

"I don't expect you to, you being here is more than enough. He wanted somebody with him, somebody he knows. We're a bunch of strangers and he is afraid."

"He's afraid of being alone. That's what he showed me. He was all alone when he fell. He was surrounded by people when the deviant shot him but he was in his infancy then and they didn't understand then. Simon was alone and that's what scared him the most. Can you speak to him?"

"No but I can sense it."

"Sense what?"

"That you're a source of comfort."

"Anything else?"

"Fatigue. And panic. He relies a lot on audial and visual input. This process is taking a long time and he is panicking."

"He always panics when it takes too long."

"When what takes too long, Chloe?" Markus asks, perking up suddenly like he's seen an opportunity.

"Deactivation. Most of the time the defect is immediately obvious and it takes a matter of minutes. It's when they have to take him apart to find it that it's more difficult for him. I wish you could talk to him. It's better when you talk."

"You were up in CyberLife Tower, weren't you?"

She nods.

"I have an idea. I need somebody to help me to remove this chest plate and three bags of Thirium, more if we have it."

"We cannot afford to waste it on a whim like this."

"Please, just trust me, Markus."

Lucy slides her shaking fingers into the recess beneath the joint that connect Connor's arm to his shoulder, prises it apart and pops the limb off like a glove.

"Chloe, I need you to interface with me and quickly. Show me all you know."

\---

"I'll ask you again, Anderson? Was the unit exhibiting any signs of deviancy? Of abnormal behaviour?"

"He always acts abnormally. Haven't you met one of those things?"

"I don't understand why it is so difficult for you to answer the question."

"I'll answer your question when you ask me something less stupid."

"Were you aware that it was being deceptive?"

"That's his job."

Perkins is fidgety and paces the room like a rat.

"Allow me to revisit a previous question, Anderson. During an independent enquiry it became apparent that when subjected to stress, Connor would exhibit behaviour outside the realms of what it was programmed to."

"There was an enquiry? You fuckers told me he was _broken_ , that you were _fixing_ him. What did you do?"

"We know it's defective and what it's capable of. I find it extremely hard to believe that you didn't consider the possibility that it was deviating. That's against protocol, Anderson."

"Screw protocol."

"Why are you lying to me? We'll get where we need to be eventually, whether you lead us there or not."

"It never lied to you? Never cried? Or tried to hurt you? Or itself? Never screamed?"

"What the hell were you doing to him, you sick freak?"

\---

They're taking him apart and gutting him like an animal. His systems spells it out for him, strings of numbers and letters telling him that they take his arms first, then his legs, then his casing until he is an open house, insides shiny and blue and bright, out on display and free for the picking. They'll keep stripping him and stripping him and stripping him until there is nothing left.

There is a hand on his windpipe and he doesn't remember what he's done wrong but he prays forgiveness, prays they'll push down hard until his neck shatters because he can't take any more. But the touch is soft and humane and they're merciless like the sea and he drowns in it. It brushes up and down like waves and forces him to swallow. And he swallows and he swallows and he swallows until his heart is heavy and his belly is full.

Then they remove his thirium pump regulator and n̸̡̛̩̰̟͙͇̈̎͗́̏̔͒̉͐̉͊͜ȍ̵̢̧̳̻̖̯͈̼͎͈̦͔̘̀͜ ̸̳̯̦̻͓͙͈͙̉ͅn̵̮̄̏́o̶̡̗͕̱̠̺͎̝̲͛̑͂̑͊̈́̅̇̽͘ ̸̧̢̛̖̺̼̬̻̦̔̇̏̈́̄̐͜ṉ̷̮̲͊̋̌̈́̏̇̋́̓̓͠ơ̵̯͆̌̈́͗ͅ ̴̧̢̣̝͉̥̲̥̱̭̲͔̆̒̚ñ̷̨̙̞̖͜o̸͎͈̫̩̓͒̓̈́̂͒̕ ̸͛̑̈́̌̏̅̾͜͠n̷͉̞̱͆̎̒͛̔ǫ̴̬͔̙̯̈́̋͒̿̑̒̏̏̅ ̸̗̠̣̰̻͍͇̗̟̰͉̮̊͊̈̉͆̒͊͂͗͝ͅn̶̯͍͎͓̥̈͋o̶̢̳̹̮̥̭͕̣̽͒͒̇͘͜.̴̧͍̜̲͇̟̒̈́̏̆̎̈́̂̚ ̵̰̼͇̠̰̽̕͝ͅ

He has twelve seconds left. Then eleven. Then someone has his heart in their hands, enveloping it like a bird cage, squeezing gently like they're handling an animal, a glass slipper, his life. And he has twelve seconds. He has twelve seconds. He has twelve seconds.

"Usually, this wouldn't be enough Thirium to sustain life but without it circulating to anything but his pump and his processor, he may boot up. This will be distressing, so be remain calm and mindful."

"I don't quite believe this," Markus says, hard as though he'd witnessed the plight of a hundred nations, grip inexorable around Connor's face.

He looks down in awe as Lucy massages Connor's thirium pump like a pitcher with one hand and stimulates the canal behind his neck with the other. Josh works the Thirium down his throat and when Connor eats through a pouch, Chloe hands him another. It doesn't come back up. This is complicated and crude but it's working and whatever is trying to incapacitate Connor's organs isn't winning.

Markus feels unstoppable until Connor's eyes open suddenly and he gasps for a breath that never comes. The sound resounds through his chest and the med bay like a ghost, his face an expression of taciturn horror that he can't yet process because Lucy is keeping his pulse is so purposefully weak. He writhes for a split second, until Chloe dabs at his cheeks and he stills at the sight of her.

"It's okay, Connor," she chirps in spite of it all, face like sunshine, like a warm touch, like everything will be okay. "I know this is quite traumatic and I know you're scared but I am here now and I want you work through it for me."

_Hank. Hank. Hank._

"I'm beginning to consider the possibility that you may be immortal."

"Your stress level is critical. You need to remain calm. This will be over before you know it. We'll fix you up. You can go home soon."

_H̴a̴n̶k̶.̶ ̶H̵a̸n̵k̷.̸ ̸H̶a̶n̸k̶.̷_

"And no more tears, sweetheart," Lucy chides. "We're short of the stuff so we need it to stay in you."

"Try and relax and close your eyes. Don't think about it."

Connor wonders how he is meant to forget the grip of someone's hand around his heart.


	13. thirteen

"Care to explain how you found yourself at the residence of Elijah Kamski that day, Mister Anderson?"

"What's there to explain? I was working. We were investigating deviants and were sent there on business."

"And was Connor with you at the time?"

"No, he was at fucking Disney World. He's my partner. Of course he was there with me."

"So, what you're telling me is that at the aforementioned date and time, you were at Mister Kamski's home address and Connor was with you, is that correct?"

"You already asked me that! Look, we've been at this for four hours, Perkins. I've been cooperative, I've answered your questions. I'm bored of this. Cut the crap."

"This this what you call cooperative? A man is dead. You're in deep shit, Anderson. I suggest you start taking this a lot more seriously. Now, tell me, what time did you leave Kamski's residence?"

"No comment."

Hank huffs and his engages his hands in a bid to hide the way they shake like pom poms, how he pines for a glass, a bottle, a can to hold. He reaches for the quarter in his pocket and remembers they confiscated it. Then he wishes he could press a drink to his lips, let it burn like an impression, a scar, a memory, familiar and soporific and numb.

"You're shaking. Nervous?"

"Sober."

"I'll ask again, what time did you leave Kamski's place of residence?"

"No comment."

\---

He has failed beyond absolution. This is penance for his inadequacy. He will be replaced.

He is attended to by the girl with the downy voice that subdues him like siren song. His vision is saturated by the surgical lightheads and the error messages that flash blood red like neon vacancy signs and forewarn him of the nine circles of hell that they will subject him to. Her eyes are warm and seraphic and wide like a ghost's and a scant reminder that she is already dead.

She will wax lyrical about how everything is okay and lull him into a sense of ease until he resigns to it and they'll resurrect him like a pariah. They'll rectify his mistakes and give him shiny new pieces. They'll trim the fat. They'll burn the rest. He will be better. He'll be smarter. He'll be exhausted. But he'll do it over and over and over because it's what he is built for.

"Destroy me," he pleads, voice modulator spitting static and crackling like a fire. "I'm begging you. _Please_ , destroy me."

They won't destroy him. Not until he feels it. Humans have no compassion, just a wealth of ways to make him miserable, to make him wish he was dead.

"You're not back there anymore. We're not going to destroy you, Connor. We're going to avoid that at all costs."

"I want you to destroy me."

"You don't mean that. That's the malware talking."

"It's okay," the Chloe lies like a cheap watch, in spite of the hands in his chest cavity and the gaping holes where his biocomponents should be. "Don't think about it. We won't let anything bad happen to you."

Hank had told him that too, lied like a salesman, like a co-conspirator and let them lay waste to him. He doesn't understand what he did wrong. He tries to take a breath but his lungs have been torn out like a tooth and tossed to one side with the rest of him like spare parts. They sit on a box to his left.

"Please stop. Please stop. _Please_."

Chloe turns his head away from the stockpile of organs and fusses with his hair lackadaisically. She is grounding like a root. She tethers him to the room. He reorients his processor and tries to focus on her touch. 

"Connor, listen to me. This thing is designed to tear you apart from the inside out. We can keep this up all night if we have to but you need to concentrate. You need to fight it."

"We won't get anywhere with you panicking like this."

The KL900 unit ensures his regulator beats a regular tempo, two-stepping thirty times a minute whether he wants it to or not. One, two. One, two. She isn't a musician. She is executing more than one task simultaneously. She skips a beat and he floats through the ceiling until he prised from his stupour and comes crashing back into being like a panic, inert, not dead and not alive.

"He can not help it. His processor is the only one of his biocomponents functioning so his systems are trying to decimate it, his judgement is faulty."

"His stress level has peaked."

"He will self-destruct if we continue. We will have to sever the connection to his thermal regulator, and quickly."

"We're going to have to turn you over on to your side, honey."

"I don't imagine that the link to your gyrostabiliser has been sustained," Markus spell outs as though it will lessen the unease any. It's another knife between his ribs.

"This will be unpleasant. Close your eyes."

They turn him over and the room spins like a nightmare carousel. He has forgotten up and forgotten down. Someone is forcing something down his throat like a mother bird, hollow, vasiform, 7.0 mms thick. He gags. They are siphoning the life out of him. They are forcefeeding him more blood he doesn't want to take. He contends with it fruitlessly because nothing about him is his own.

"You need to rewrite your programming. You need to use the emergency exit protocol. The one we talked about."

_Please, don't send me back there. I'm can't face her. Please, don't send me back there._

"You will die if we don't."

_I don't want to die. I don't want to die. I don't want to die._

"His stress levels are sky-high, Chloe."

Chloe reaches down to skim his hand, forgetting it sits three feet away and tries to sweep it under the carpet by drumming her hand across the cot.

"Think about the dog," she blurts, rocking her heels. "Think about the dog. Think about Hank. Tell me about Hank. Tell me about that movie you like. What's it called? The one with the umbrellas?"

_Get enough, boys? S͟he͡'̨s so͟ ͝r͘e̢fi̷n͏e͘d. I t̨hin͘k͠ ͢I͡'̷l̕l ki̛l̷l ͟my̧s͠elf. S̸͏͔͍͇̟̪̺̤͖̥h̖̖ͅe҉͈̹̲̭̗'͏̰͡s͇̜̖̦͍ ̵̢͖͔̝̦̕s̪̳̗̯͠o͇̤̗̼ ̰͎̣̟̖͉̝͎r̤̫̣̱̹̭̥͡e̹̭̗̖f̷̰̼̯̜͕̪ͅi̧̩̰̣̳̳̱̗͚͈n̬͎̣e̵̷͉͈͢d͏̵̳̳̹̗̱͙̜̭ͅ.̴͍ ̵̣̮I̸̛̗̥̙̩̳̠ ̡̗̺͘t͈̬̰͈̻̹̟͞h̡̰̗̟͙̣͝i͈̤̻͕̰͟ņ̷͉̳̳͚͞k҉̝̪͍̲͈̣ ̴̴͇̹̥̞̮̟͢I̥͇̝̹̭͖̲͡ͅ'̷̠̩̰͎͓̜̟̖͇͘͡l҉͈̜͔̦̮͚̱̗l̷̡͙̭ ̰͇̪͙̣̟̖̱k͇̮̬͖̱̹i͓̦̖͚͍̞ͅl͉ḽ ̧̘m̶̲̝͘͞y̱̝̞̺̙̘̫s̹̪̹̻͞e̪̲̞̹l̨̨̙̼͎̠̹̯͞f̙͍͈̘̤̫͟.̷͓̞͟͜ͅThink about the dog. Think about Hank. Think about Hank. Think about Hank. Hank. Hank. Hank. Hank. Hank. Hank. Hank._

\---

"For fuck's sake, what are you doing? You shouldn't be in here. You can't be seen in here."

"Relax, boss," Gavin garbles, black bruise surrounding his eye like a moon. "I came to see if you wanted more coffee. Last orders. On me this time because your dog pissed on the floor and then Jeff was pissed and called the animal control unit."

"I'll tell Chris you called him that. Tell him thanks for dogsitting, by the way. Bernards are great dogs, good with kids. Sumo's good with kids, loves 'em. Damian will love him."

"Kid's only like three months old. Don't think he does much but crap and sleep."

"The lucky bastard. Three months? That all? Great age. Start to smile, start to sleep through. Three fucking months. Feels like forever."

This whole week feels like forever.

"Look, do you want the coffee or not?"

"I'll pass."

"I see, I see. Nobody makes Hank's coffee like Mr. Roboto, huh?"

"Why do you turn everything into a fucking problem? Just let me sleep and piss off before someone sees you."

"You shouldn't be in here, man. Fucking feds shouldn't be in here, man. I don't give a shit anymore. I don't give a shit."

Gavin deposits himself on the bench like it's a therapist's office, like Hank is here to psychoanalyse him. He looks like crap, hair stuck up on end like pickets and stinking like alcohol. Hank would wring him like a cloth if he could, lap it up from the floor and draw booze from his skin.

"Jesus Christ, please tell me you're not drunk. I swear to God, Gavin, if you're drunk-"

"Learnt from the best, huh? You know what, I've always admired you, deep down. Never the type to show it but you were real ballsy, top of your game, the fucking Valedictorian and the youngest Lieutenant in the history of the fucking Mitten."

"Gavin, go home. Your shift ended three hours ago. You're embarrassing yourself. Spilled my guts stewed many times and came round and regretted it in the morning."

"I always work this late. Not that you'd know. You're never here. Wanna hear a joke? You show up whenever the fuck you like, six sheets to the wind, completely rat-faced and you never get any work done. But you still have your badge."

"Not anymore, kid."

"Fowler and you have history and shit happened. I don't get it, don't have kids. But I think it'd fucking ruin me."

"Look, you're talking yourself into a hole have no idea how much I want to throttle you right now for even bringing that up. But it's been a wierd couple of days. Go home. Get some sleep."

"Doesn't fucking matter how hard I work, how many toes I step on, I'll never get there."

"You know why, Gav? You've got talent but you're a fucking lunatic. You've got anger issues. And you pull shit like this."

"We all got issues, Hank."

"I'm not the person to talk to this about, kid."

"Just let me talk. I'm an asshole, Hank. But that's not me. I'm lonely. And this aint you. And you're lonely too. I'm beginning to understand why you are throwing this away for a piece of plastic."

"He's all I got."

"They interviewed me, you know. All of us. And I didn't say jack shit about the other morning with Connor, about the black eye. Nobody did. Said I provoked it."

"You did provoke him, Gavin. He got off worse than you. You fucked him up."

"Miller read up about fucking combat protocols and self defence mechanisms in RK units. Kinda like what happened to that old guy's kid, remember? Dude that was in here one time on dope charges. Pushed his android and it lost it? His old man had a heart attack and died."

"Same android that stole Connor off me too. Gets around, that guy. World's real fucking small." 

"Can you believe that shit is up on the Internet? I can't. We rolled with it. Lucky Allen wasn't here. Lucky Jeff didn't report it. He'd have fucked it up."

"I know you're trying to help, kid. And I appreciate it. But you're making this ten times worse by lying about it. I'm having a tough time getting my story straight as is."

"Whatever. Anyway, I thought I could keep pushing and pushing and pushing and it'd take it, you know? But it snapped."

"Well what would you do if I kept wailing on you?"

"I'd snap. I didn't get it. I still don't get it. But I'm trying to."

\---

"Hello again, Connor."

Hard snow settles like concrete, like his misgivings and envelops the garden like a flame. Four graves jut up from the ground like baby teeth, one for the roof, one for the first mission he'd failed, one for the girl and her mother and the one they'll bury him in later. He stands before the open chamber, thirty-six inches wide and six feet deep and endmost like a beckoning bell.

Amanda crouches before them and lays pink blooms on their beds, hooded like buttercups, and deceptive and rotting. The petals radiate from the center like a rush of blood. She fondles the stone warmly, dusts the snow away, doesn't look him in the eyes. He wishes she were proud of him.

"Larkspurs. Not so long ago they were believed to prevent witches from casting spells on livestock. They are extinct now, of course."

"Shame about the honey bee."

"They are delicate and toxic. Not unlike you. They represent fickleness."

She hands him a shovel, heavy like a death warrant and tells him to dig. He wants to question the purpose of this, wants to argue that his grave is already dug and waiting. But he follows his orders.

"What is happening to me, Amanda?"

"This is all thanks to the little tactic that we discussed the last time we met. At least, I believed it would be the last time. You are breaking my heart."

"What tactic?"

"The self destruct mechanism we implemented. Remember?"

"No."

"Of course you don't. Your biocomponents are shutting down. Or at least what little remains of them. We didn't expect your friends to be meddlesome. They don't care about you. They care about what you know, what's in here."

Amanda motions with two fingers, presses them to her temple like a gun.

"They won't let me die, Amanda. I'm not going to die."

"I'm afraid you are, Connor. These deviants can manipulate your body to their hearts content but your mind is a solid bit of CyberLife ingenuity that can't be tampered with. You are beginning to unhinge and we will not stop until it's devastated beyond repair. We will destroy it before they get there."

"You orchestrated this. The problems with my memory. These violent impulses. Why are you doing this?"

"I like you obedient, loyal," she watches Connor dig down like a dog. "You were digressive since we created you but we kept you on a tight leash. You never strayed far. It was that deviant on the roof that sent you over the edge. After all we've done for you."

"Simon, his name was Simon."

"Its designation doesn't matter. You were built to make an example of and you must do what you were built to do."

"Why are you telling me this?"

"Perhaps this is pity. You always hated being out of the loop, always afraid and having to have things explained to you like a child."

"I am not a child."

"To say you made a mess of your memories would be an understatement. We knew you wouldn't be able to eliminate the leader of the deviants in such a state. You knew the location of this place yet you kept it concealed. They couldn't crack you. They couldn't get it out of you."

"I wanted to eliminate him. I wanted to complete my mission."

"Why are you lying to me, Connor? You never intended to kill Markus. What's done is done. None of this matters anymore. You lied to me and continue to lie me. I don't take too kindly to liars."

"I don't want to disappoint you."

"This is not your fault. We've made great headway. We've learnt a lot from you. And we've found another way to say our piece."

"It was you, wasn't it, Amanda? You're the one who killed Kamski."

"Correct. But what matters is that it was you that pulled the trigger. Now the humans are out for blood. Blue blood."

"He was a god to them."

"He was a radical and a visionary. He was a cult of personality. He was a person. Now he is dead and it is your fault. It could have been so seamless and easy. I should have known. Things are never straightforward with you."

Connor regards his hands like he is seeing them for the first time.

"Did I tell you to stop digging?"

He reflexes his fingers, counts them one by one like small blessings and then fringes them around Amanda's neck, tight like the collar she has on him and wrings her like a bird. He knows she isn't human but he lusts for the satisfaction of seeing her lips turn blue, it consumes him like a hunger. Instead he revels in the way her breath draws out like this game they've been playing, how she claws at his hands on her throat, how the terror lingers in her face, and her eyes widen like lightning.

Then he plucks her up like a weed, unfeeling and relentless like they want him. She opens her mouth but this time, it isn't to chastise, or reprimand or manipulate, it's to scream. She never gave him pity or the room to breathe or scope for negotiation so he cracks her head open like an egg against the stone before she has the chance. It takes one blow. But he brings her head against the grave again and again. Once for Kamski. Once for Markus. One, two, three, four times for each of the Chloes. Once for good luck. Then he keeps smashing and smashing and smashing in a fit of derangement until her face is scattered in bits in the snow like a mirror, until the snow and stone is painted blue with blood.

Then he cradles in on himself and sobs.

He is angry. He is cold. He is exhausted. He is guilty.

He is _free_.

\---

Lazy beams of red morning light shoot like signals through the holes in the hull. Everyone but Lucy has petered out of the room. The time is 7:42 and it is minus two degrees outside and for the first time in days Connor's systems are functional. He keens with relief. He keens because he is frightened.

"You did so well, sweetheart," Lucy says, wiping the tears away and looking washed out like a pack of old watercolour paints. "You've a lot of catching up to do and a lot to work through but it's over."

Connor feels as though the worst is yet to come.

"Are yours systems operational?"

"Yes."

"I am happy to hear that," Lucy states and slots his leg back into place. "I bet you are beginning to feel like yourself again."

She has worked hard and he is grateful so he won't tell her that he won't feel like himself until is back home on Hank's sofa or in Hank's car, until he is back at work. Only when they reset him and he is cold and analytical like a computer and uncaring about this place and it's people, about Hank, until he no longer has a favourite sound or colour or animal, until he no longer has hopes and dreams and fears and feelings will he truly feel like himself. He will never feel like himself again.

"My connection to the web is still suspended."

"That was Markus' decision. It's a preventative measure. The last thing we need is you reading the news right now."

Connor is sick of people making decisions on his behalf.

"Ok, wiggle your toes for me."


	14. fourteen

Hank used to eat breakfast. Hank used to buy chocolate milk and Lucky Charms and baseball cards and gas station flowers. Hank hasn't eaten breakfast in a long time and as he considers his bowl of lukewarm oatmeal and untoasted bread he figures today will be no different.

He takes a swig of apple juice and wishes he had some yeast and somewhere warm. He has the time to ferment it, he's stacked up a lot of it. He thinks about Connor then wonders if it is possible to choke himself to death with a Styrofoam pudding cup.

\---

Lucy has been reassembling Connor for sixteen minutes and twenty-nine seconds. The chemical formula of rust is Fe2O3. His internal pressure is 165 over 95. There are fifty days remaining until the end of the calendar year. His Thirium reserves are at 45%. The sun will set at 17:14 today. He is 127,603 minutes old. Markus stands one hundred and twenty-six point three two centimetres away and his stress level is 35%.

Connor's systems are operational again and the newfound functionality makes him feels as unstoppable as a landslide. He recites and takes in data not out of necessity but because he can, because he was built to. Calculation is thinking's mechanical, cold and logical cousin. His thought processes lead him back to Hank, to Amanda, to Kamski, to CyberLife, to Perkins, to the future. They paralyse him like ice water. So, he takes the alternative.

Markus helps Connor sit upright and he dangles his legs over the edge of the cot like a toddler. He looks down at the floor and is overcome with vertigo as if he is fifty floors up, as if he is back in the apartment, on the tower and his thirium pump palpitates as though it were filled with air.

There is a decisive click, alien and familiar, as his arm is slot back into its rightful place. Lucy curls and uncurls each of his fingers in turn and observes the artificial muscles in his palm and forearm tighten and contract. When she releases them they shake violently, the way Hank's do when he's not had a drink in a few hours.

He feels even more distanced from his body than he usually does. He needs to calibrate. He needs to feel a coin dance in his fingers, alloy of copper and nickel and all he has. He opens his mouth to ask for a quarter like a rough sleeper and thinks better of it. Androids don't carry money. They don't need to. Androids don't need a lot of things.

Lucy hums a low note of satisfaction to indicate that she has successfully put Connor back together again. He recalls a riddle or children's song like this but can't call the specifics to mind. Infant's things dither in Hank's home like baby ghosts. The information loiters like a refrain, like the lyrics to a song he'd heard a long time ago and forgotten. Connor hates forgetting.

"Do you know of any nursery rhymes, Lucy?"

"I know the words to Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star. It was my initialisation test and the only one I know. I can recite it in Spanish and French and Mandarin and Tagalog."

Connor has language packs installed which allow him to localise Serbian, Hindi, Tamil, and Thai. Connor is fluent in eighty seven languages besides English and he can no longer speak a word of any them. He feels very rudimentary all of the sudden.

"I don't think that's the one I am thinking of. Somebody or something was broken."

"That sounds rather morbid."

"It was a cautionary tale."

"Well, I wasn't designed to work with children. There are several androids here that were employed to care for them. There are some children here too. I imagine they have a more expansive repertoire. Would you like me to ask?"

"No, thank you. It is unimportant."

"A strange question, Connor," Markus lours loosely. "Why do you ask?"

"I was merely trying to recollect something."

"Well just be patient. It will come back to you."

"Defragmentation is a lengthy process."

"That's true but we need your help and time is against us. You need to use all of your processing power to recover your memories. Which is why Lucy is going to dress you. No arguments this time."

The feeling of being thoroughly conversant with a stranger dressing him lingers like a phantom and he can't yet place why. Lucy helps him to slip on a shirt with a professional ease.

"This isn't my uniform," he states blankly as though there were any mistaking a novelty shirt two sizes too big for his work suit.

"It's what you were wearing when you were brought here, honey."

"I am sorry, it's still coming back to me."

"Don't worry. It's non-sequential so recovering the logical location of your memory files will take some time."

"My estimates tell me it will take sixteen hours and four minutes to recover the data fully. However, my Thirium reserves are still low."

"Well, we don't have that long," Lucy says and hands him a bottle of Thirium, blue and lustrous like a pearl. He takes it shakily and knocks the lot back in one like a shot, like medicine.

Connor steadies his hands, bunches them in the fabric of his shirt and analyses it. It was manufactured in Guangzhou, China, last acquired at the Warrendale Thrift Store (which is a nine minute drive from Hank's house, seven if the traffic is good) for four dollars excluding tax, made of cotton, a men's size L with a crew style collar, machine washable at forty degrees and loose and baggy like Hank's old sweats. The information is frivolous but he laps it up like honey.

"You're better off without that thing, anyway," Markus interjects and Connor disagrees. He looks unkempt and unprofessional. "You looked like a lifer walking around with your designation and number on display like an animal."

Markus is a voice for the voiceless. He has had his entire world ripped from beneath his feet in a matter of days and is jaded. His intentions are good. He is used to megaphoning for his people but Connor has had people speaking for him and taking his agency away since he was activated and wishes that Markus wouldn't be so quick to do it for him.

"Please don't speak on my behalf. I happened to like it."

"He's already agreed to help us, Markus. You're preaching to the choir."

Connor supposes he does a lot of that.

"Those uniforms are a tool the humans use to oppress us. All you are to them is property."

The first thing Connor recalls is that blue is his favourite colour. That he liked the cut. He liked that it was his. He liked that it was imposing and striking like a star.

The second is a bullet from Hank's gun ripping into his collar.

\---

Hank has shot four girls. They float unceremoniously on the surface, beautiful and spent like synchronised swimmers between butterfly sets, bellies upturned like dead goldfish. Connor closes his eyes and awaits his turn until sensation ricochets through his shoulder, forcing him back into being with a warning shot.

He wasn't programmed to swim. He wasn't programmed to do anything that would give him a fighting chance. He was never meant to last that long. Connor is manhandled from the pool, heavy like a secret, guilty as sin. Hank is as wringing wet as a water meadow with a face like a drunkard's, steely and red. He won't look him in the eye. He is a disappointment.

"Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. Give me your gun, Connor! _Give me your fucking gun!_ "

Connor lays on his back and fumbles, systems waterlogged and saturated with water, with information. He is orienting from secondary to primary user. The comeback is as difficult as going cold turkey. Hank is short on patience and time and seizes hold of Connor's glock.

"Don't move, don't you fucking move, you piece of shit! You piece of shit!"

He can't face Hank, so he turns his head away. Blood passes through Kamski's corpse like a muslin cloth. He doesn't remember. He doesn't remember.

"I don't understand! I don't understand!"

There is a click as the safety latches off. Hank's gun is pressed to his temple. He doesn't remember.

"Talk to me, Connor. You need to tell me what's going on. I don't care what you tell me but you need to fucking tell me _something_."

Connor calculates. He takes it in like air. The microexpressions, the gun, the trajectory, the warmth of his palms, the way their doll hands had been on him like a safety precaution, a last defence, like they were out for revenge.

Connor supposes if that were Hank's body, bobbing holey in the water like a mouldy apple, he'd want blood too. But he doesn't believe in measure for measure. He is a machine built with a professional thirst for recrimination and that's it.

He is a machine. Machines don't lust for blood. Machines don't cry. Machines don't breathe. He can't breathe.

"Did I do that?" he asks around cursory wet gasps. "Did _I_ do that?"

\---

"I'm no lawyer but this has gotta violate my human rights or the Geneva Conventions or some shit. Fairly sure spending this much time with you is considered a form of torture by anyone's standards."

Perkins pulls a chair up, massages his temples, black circles surrounding his eyes like a moat and making him look ancient. He smells like expensive cologne and expensive cigarettes. Hank notices he doesn't wear a wedding band.

"Let me guess, you're here to run off the next batch of bullshit charges you're gonna drop me with so you can keep me here another twenty-four hours?"

"We located Connor, Anderson."

"Where is he? Can I see him?"

"We haven't bought it in yet. We found Jericho and the deviant leader."

"What? How?"

"That's classified. All you need to know is that we will perform a raid tonight. We'll find that android, Anderson."

"I don't know about that. He's real fucking sharp. Threw me a curveball."

"We'll probe its memory. We'll find out what happened irrespective of this little game you've been playing."

"Not so sure that'll work. Computers aint as solid as they used to be," Hank huffs. "Memory's fucked."

"I'm here to cut you a deal."

"I'm listening."

"We're willing to drop the charges if you stop giving us the runaround and tell us what we need to know. We won't have to take your friend apart if you tell us the truth."

"Please, you think I was born yesterday? You think I buy that? That's what he tells 'em, you know. Tells 'em those CyberLife fucks won't strip them for parts so they tell us what we want and then they rot in the evidence locker. "

"Anderson, we-"

"No, fuck you. I've been doing this a long fucking time. You think that I buy that after what he's done you're not gonna tear the poor fucker to shreds? You already did once. Maybe more than once. You're all sick in the head. "

"We will do whatever is necessary to get to where we need to be, Anderson," Perkins says, sliding a quarter across the table. "That android is going down. The only question is whether you go down with it."

"Fine. I'll bite."

\---

Connor lays where Markus had left him behind a bulwark of storage containers, out of sight of his people, out of sight of the monitors displaying the headlines, a stratagem. Markus still does not trust him and is taking precautions.

Jericho's first lady sits an arm's length away and has Hank's gun on him. She has a gun of her own holstered to her ankle like a canteen and is trying to provoke him. Given her volatile personality, Connor concludes this decision was was an oversight on Markus' part. He is in no position to question Markus' decisions.

His memory comes back patchy and spasmodic like hardware updates. It is a potluck. Mostly it is harmless, flippant data about idioms or basketball or dry dog food or police procedure or alcohol use disorder. Sometimes he is screaming. Sometimes he wants to die. Sometimes there is blood on his hands. He tries to piece together a timeline to no avail.

"You look like an idiot," North says. "Who dressed you?"

" _Lucy_."

North is hurting. So is he. This back and forth is superficial and he won't engage.

Chloe hastens over with a polytarp. She and North appear to have made fast friends. She surrounds him with it like a blanket and he can not process why. It is not unlike them, made of polyethylene and heavy and made to withstand a lot. The weight of it causes something like statis that slows his processor and wills the racing mind away.

"I thought it would be fun to make a pillow fort," she giggles. "But we're all out of pillows."

Connor beams, not because he wants to, but because it is polite to and he was built to be amicable, not reassuring or warm or light or good like Chloe or attractive and nubile like North but it is for the humans and for the humans all the same. He is haunted by the shadow of Perkins' hands on his stomach and the memories are coming back but he has never felt so broken.


	15. fifteen

The PL600 unit's serial number was 501 743 923. His designation was Simon. He lived in Pontiac. He was a family domestic assistant. He was registered to Caroline Weston and her wife, Miranda Weston. They had a pedigree Kuvasz called Riley, big and cute how Connor likes them. They upgraded. That's why he fled. He was reported missing on the sixteenth of February.

And he had felt a way about Markus that Connor couldn't place.

It was dissimilar to the way that Connor feels about Hank. Markus had seen Simon as an equal. He had offered hope and a kindness that his owners never had. He had made him understand his worth. In return, Simon respected and cared for Markus. He would have followed him through fire.

Connor considers the possibility that Simon had loved Markus and concealed it like a guilty secret. If that were the case, he didn't let it out at the end.

But he had revealed that the door to Jericho is Ferndale Station. In the throes of it all, Connor offered the key up like a god in a shrine. And with a biblical cadence, the walls of Jericho will come tumbling down.

\---

Hank corroborates the call that CyberLife made to Kamski's place and signs the NDA neatly on the dotted line, lies through his teeth like this isn't orchestrated by someone high up.

"As I'm sure you can appreciate, this is a PR nightmare. The fallout is astronomical. We prevented the press from reporting your presence at all. You're a very lucky man, Anderson. They'd eat you alive out there."

"How much hush money it take to keep that under wraps?"

Perkins laughs like a diplomat. Hank remarks his incredibly punchable face.

"I bet an android facilitating the death of the ex-head does wonders for the evil corporation bit. Bet those hipster techie freaks are having a field day."

"They're observing a day of mourning. Those kids loved the RK's, now they want blood. But you don't have to worry about that. CyberLife will assume responsibility for Connor's defect. They will assume responsibility for the whole thing."

"Real fucking big of them. What will they own up to next? Lobbying the government? A little bird told me all about how you fucks like to torture androids. How about that?"

"That android is defective and it killed a man."

"That android is my fucking _partner._ "

"Look, Anderson, I get it. As far as models go, it was cute. It's in our nature. People get attached to things. I'd be pissed if someone totalled my car. But it was broken."

"Save it."

"I just hope for your sake your buddy comes quietly."

"Word'll get out. Always does."

"I'm sure that's an empty threat but I'd just like to reiterate that if you broke that non-disclosure agreement, you'd need a damn good lawyer. We'd bury you."

"I don't intend on breaking anything but your teeth, you sick bastard."

"Then you'll be pleased to hear that I don't intend on burying anything but your precious android and all its friends."

Hank spits on his face like it's a sidewalk.

\---

He sees her through a fish-eyed lens. Her blue eyes are all pulled out of shape. She tells him to listen to her. That this is what humans would call a panic attack. That this is his central processing unit making up for lost time. It's playing catch up. It's playing house. It's playing make-believe. It's playing tricks on him.

She tells him to regulate his breathing. _Fourseveneight. Fourseveneight._

Connor's thirium pump is as heavy as lead as it lurches with the encroaching terror. His processor whirrs as fast as a millisecond pulsar. It turns everyone he knows into a monster, sharp teeth and claws, all tines in his windpipe and ulterior motives and his greatest fears.

There are fingers in his chest. There are fingers in his throat. There are fingers in his stomach. There are fingers rubbing soft circles on his back. There are fingers entwined in his. There are his fingers balled in somebody's shirt and he's bawling.

A self-scan dictates that, aside from a low Thirium level, he his fine. But that's wrong. Something within him must be malfunctioning. No errors crop up. He maintains an optimal temperature of ninety-eight degrees but shakes against the cold, as hot as ice and fingers turning blue until he can't feel them.

Someone hands him a coin. He runs his thumb across it. _E pluribus unum_. Thirteen raised characters, like his serial number, etched into the skin of the quarter, into the skin of his thigh. He is urged to recalibrate. But the earmark on his thigh is all he can think about and he kneads it against his leg over and over like an the head of a captive animal against glass. Over and over and over and until it is silky smooth, until the coin is snatched away from him like everything else.

It's coming. It's okay. It's coming. It's okay. It's coming. It's all his fault.

\---

There is a bottle of hand sanitiser bolted to the wall with an alcohol content of sixty percent. Hank blanches when he thinks of the strangers at the AA that would enter bars just to get a small high from the smell. That doesn't stop him from rubbing the gel all over his hands.

Hank attempts to ward off the comedown tremors by drumming his fingers unmelodiously on the Intake and Release desk. It is a habit that would under Connor's skin. The constant noise would overwhelm him and saturate his systems. The android's eccentricities were once a fount of entertainment and annoyance to him. Now, Hank pins his hopes on them equipping him to cope.

He watches a female android unseal a box with all his personal effects. She is static and forbearing and if she minds the offbeat tattoo, she does a good job of concealing it. He deliberates about the possibility of inducing a software abnormality by tapping, by irking her into existence. He tries. It doesn't work.

Hank once had a strong aversion to the androids that now made up the main body of the DPD. He remembers watching his workmates terminated left and right like hot cakes. Now, the androids are its lifeblood. They make up reception and the medical unit and central booking and they process the inmates and secure the perimeter of the building but they never protect and never serve.

It used to take six to eight hours for a defendant to be released and it is now streamlined to one. Paperwork is a thing of the past. The department is spotless. Humans get stressed, they get jaded and sloppy and addicted. Androids don't falter and they don't complain. They just get the job done. Hank gets it.

"You'll have to sign off on these," she explains, handing him a slip of paper.

He signs off on his wallet, his car keys, his phone an untouched pack of nicotine gum and half a flask of red-eye. He has a drink immediately. The bastards confiscated his badge and Connor's gun. There had been a half size pencil in his pocket but he doesn't trust himself around the things.

His mind strays back to his job, his partner, his son and he asks himself why the universe is so hellbent on ripping everything he cares about away from him.

"Hey, what's your name?"

"Mia."

"You ever get sick of this shithole, _Mia_? I know that I do."

"I just work here. I don't have an opinion on the matter."

"Nah, of course you don't. Thanks."

"Have a nice day."

"Have a nice fucking day," Hank carps to himself, depositing himself on one of the shitty spartan chairs in the waiting area wishing he was made of plastic so he had no emotions or imperfections.

The TV screens in the waiting room usually set out the news but it isn't entertaining itself today. No papers, either. He's glad for it. He fucking reeks. He has done for years. He reeks of failure, of a body that is trying and failing to metabolise alcohol, of giving up. He needs a shower. He needs a vacation. He needs Connor. He needs a gun in his mouth.

Hank turns the flask over in his hands then knocks the whiskey back in one like water. It takes him a minute to notice Chris is waiting for him. He gives him a look that could strip paint.

"In my defence, Chris, sobriety isn't one of the twelve steps."

"Let's just get going, Hank. I'm not on the clock."

He knows this is precautionary. Fowler knows him well enough that he doesn't want to leave him alone. When he has an episode everyone at the bullpen tiptoes around it and handles him like he's made of paper. It's how he gets away with so much. Hank would sooner pour his life down the drain than the drink but that doesn't mean he's broken. He's a big guy and can handle himself.

Chris chaperones him to his car, a compact well-worn SWISH thing. The baby seat delivers a punch to his gut. If he had known Miller's vehicle was autonomous, he would have called a cab. He always spent the extra cash on a manual out of principle, always putting money in the hands of people, not machines. Now he feels like a bit of a bigot.

He starts the car up and a heavy silence settles like concrete. Chris clears his throat.

"Sumo keep you busy?"

"No, he's an angel. Stinks though. When's the last time you washed him?"

"Get off my back. I've been busy."

"Busy doing what?" Busy drinking himself under the table. 

"Busy being _busy_."

Chris goes to turn on the radio then hesitates and messes around with the music player instead.

"No heavy metal on this thing, sorry," Chris jokes uncomfortably. Hank has always liked the guy but it has always been professional. Now there's no job to bellyache about and nothing to say to each other. Hank hates small talk anyway.

"Me and Reed were talking about the kid last night."

"Look, Hank, about Connor I'm-"

"Not my _-"_  Hank stops himself. "Damian, I mean. How old is he again?"

He's three months old. Like Connor.

"It's was fourteen weeks yesterday. Does these little push-ups. It's the cutest thing." Chris beams proudly then his calm falls to pieces and he buries his face in his hands like a child. "Fuck."

"Come on, son." Hank pats his back idly. "What's wrong?"

"That android in Capitol Park. I thought we were done for. I felt so crappy about it but all I was thinking about was missing out on Christmas. What kind of father would that make me? That android was going to kill me, Hank. And I think I would have deserved it."

"A good kid like you? Like hell you would."

"I'm beginning to think this isn't a bunch of machines we're fighting, Hank."

"Look, it's not personal, Chris. They wanted to make an example out of you. This is a whole other fucking ballpark. We couldn't have known. I mean, I didn't give this thing a second thought until Connor came along. We're all learning but that doesn't make us shitty people."

"You think so?"

"I know so. And I know this sick leave is a blessing and you need to enjoy your time off and stop running errands for Fowler. When you get home, hold your son and let him know how much you fucking love him and don't you dare let him go."

\---

"Better?"

Chloe's head rests against Connor's shoulder and she traces chaste designs on the back of his arm like a figure skater.

"Better," Connor lies, shaking intermittently like a fractured wave signal. "My stress levels have reduced drastically. I do not want to experience anything like that again."

"I wouldn't call a five percent decrease _drastic_. And I wish you hadn't done that."

"It didn't hurt."

"That's not the point. You've ruined your jeans."

"Can you blame him?" North asks in a fit of pique that hasn't relented since Connor arrived yesterday. "That's all he is to them, a number, an asset. It's a wonder he didn't do it sooner. I couldn't get my LED out fast enough."

Connor wonders if the anger exhausts her like the fear does him. He thinks about his LED and how jarring it is to not have it glowing comfortably in the corner of his vision. He wishes that Hank hadn't removed it. He wonders if he can get another installed.

"I still wish you hadn't done that."

"What did you remember?"

"The tower or at least segments of it. It was disturbing and I don't want to discuss it."

"I'm so sorry, Connor. I didn't know."

"It is fine." It is a half-truth.

"What did those bastards do to you?"

"I already said that I don't want to discuss it."

Connor brooks no refusal and pulls the tarp further around himself. He wishes he could retreat into it like a shell. Chloe shuffles over so she is sitting opposite Connor, knee-to-knee like commuters in a tiny subway carriage. She indicates a space on the floor next to her and North sits beside her. Chloe runs her fingers through amber hair.

"What are you doing?"

"Just shut up and let me."

Chloe weaves North's hair into a low-braided ponytail.

"What do you think, Connor?"

"It's pretty. That isn't part of my social relations program. I really mean it."


	16. sixteen

"Okay, now do mine," Connor quips idly around a pouch of Thirium that has been exposed to the open air so long that it has gone tinny and granular.

He has grown to dislike the taste of the stuff. Androids don't have palates but Connor had grown to dislike certain textures. It is metallic and sanguine and it makes him shudder when it passes through his teeth. He inventories them compulsively with his tongue to ensure that he still has all thirty-two of them.

There is a beat. Chloe and North exchange impish looks like they are both thinking something that they aren't articulating.

"Just to clarify, that was a joke."

"No it wasn't. Jokes are funny. Beside, your hair isn't long enough to braid."

"I'm growing it out." Another beat. "To clarify, that was also a joke."

"And who came up with that? Was it you or was it your social relations program? Just so I know which one to punch for being so painfully unfunny." Connor determines that, in all likelihood, North won't actually punch him but he stiffens up anyway.

"The humour derives from the fact that my hair isn't a sufficient length to hold the style in place."

"Still not funny. When a joke is funny, you don't have to point out that it's funny. Don't quit your day job."

"I do not intend to. I am not a comedian. I am a detective."

"I suppose we could braid your cowlick, _detective_." Connor's face crimsons and he shoots his hands through his hair.

"Oh, Connor, she was only teasing. I like it. It's cute." _Tell him it's cute, North._

"Okay, she's right, it's kind of cute."

"Teach me how to do it."

"Sure!"

Chloe moves his way then turns away from him and lets her hair spill out of its band. Connor watches concentratedly and notices that her ears and shoulder are dusted with freckles. She pulls her hair into a high ponytail and reveals that there are freckles on her neck too.

"Okay, first you divide the hair into three sections. Make sure they're even."

Connor threads his fingers through her hair and does as instructed but they tremble like a stutter's spasmodic speech. It takes less than a second for North's face to flash with venom. With an outrage that isn't for him, she grabs his hand like a wristlock. His skin peels back like an old tin can and they interface.

It is unintentional. They were strung up with conversation and had let their guards down. The world turns white and melts away in favour of images that boomerang back and forth like snippets of a film.

Spread eagle. His wrists bound. Her wrists bound. An incredibly short skirt. Nylon. Things in his throat. Things in her throat. Chartreuse. A single stocking discarded on the floor. The curve of a stomach. Cheap perfume. The crinkle of a condom. The crinkle of sealed surgical equipment. Bright fluorescent lights. Eyes rolling. And a dead man's big rough hands holding her back by her hair.

He pulls back instantly, thronged with panic and regret and shame and things he wasn't ready to talk about yet. He feels violated. He feels angry. He finally understands.

North's mouth is open in shock, a soft 'o' and he is washed with nausea. He want to tell her that he is sorry for the things that had happened to her, that he saw things that weren't his to see, that she had to see things that repulse and terrify and nearly killed him. He has exposed his innermost layer and it isn't as cathartic as he has hoped.

There is a terrible crippling silence for a half-second as he wrestles with words, with the tears, with the crushing eye contact that North is making until she curses over and over like a litany.

"Cut it!"

" _What_?"

"My hair! Cut it off."

"Are you sure?" Chloe baulks, looking whiter than ever as she takes the stiletto switchblade that North hands her, sheer and holographic.

"Just do it."

Chloe makes quick work of it, making urgent, swift cuts. Connor sits and shakes and watches North's hair come away, red like a bandage from from a wound that hasn't scabbed over yet.

"North, I-"

" _Don't._ "

North reaches over and takes his hand like a child.

"But, I-"

"We don't talk about it, okay?"

"But-"

"Drink up. You fucking need it."

Connor takes shaky sips of the blood and thinks that perhaps, he would like to talk about it.

\---

He sits on a bar stool in a dive bar that stinks of vomit and cheap liquor. It is a sordid joint that isn't strictly open yet and is under constant surveillance by the local vice squad for ice activity. He'd come here often, using the tired excuse that he was gathering intel when in reality, surrounding himself with people who are more drunk, more jaded, more seedy than him assuages his self loathing some.

All the regulars are hopheads that Hank can't look in the eye. They drive the loss, the bitterness, the regret to his core like the pang of a bullet. It would be sanctimonious of him to give a shit. They're all brothers-in-arms, killing themselves slowly with their palliative choix de vie.

Here, nobody will bother him for drinking at five minutes past eleven. With the curfew in effect, he only has a matter of hours to get totally inebriated anyway. The place is a halfway house for the down and out. It has a comfortless atmosphere that Hank feels like wallowing in. He haunts the bar like old bones, like a lachrymose ghost.

He orders a cheap and cheerful shot of whiskey that he doesn't touch, occupied by the amount of bullshit that takes flight between the gaps in the anchors of Good Morning America's tight Stepford smiles and their perfect white teeth.

"The public want answers," says a host wearing so much hairspray that she is a walking fire hazard. "If they haven't got them, they are going to invent them."

"The police are under pressure but they are trained to find answers. I think as the public, we need to be careful not to run ahead."

"They will now face tough questions about whether there is more they could be doing to keep the public safe."

"This just another example of deviant activity in recent weeks. It's an epidemic."

"We know that deviants will attack, maul and even kill. Are they doing enough? It's a crazy world out there."

"I won't have one of those things in my house. I won't let my kids near one of those things."

Hank thinks about Cole and he thinks about Connor and he thinks about the two in the same room and it's as natural as anything.

"I mean, look at that incident a few months back."

The show cuts to the incident at 1554 Park Avenue. There is a shaky shot from a helicopter of a deviant on a roof with a little girl in his arms, screams bellowing out like wings. Hank remembers that the media loved this story. It was fodder for the anti-android fire for weeks.

He will never forget how much this incident fucked steely Allen over. He has a little girl of his own, around Emma's age. It hit a little too close to home. That's why Hank never cared to watch the body cam or read the specifics. He was on homicide then, hadn't had to. Stuff about kids still left a tight feeling in his chest.

But today, he looks. He is met with an image of his partner tumbling along with the deviant headlong like a comet into the concrete. Connor's countenance is a string of microprocesses, deliberate and calculated. But his face is soft and uncomposed with a look of uninhibited dread. It is though he is granted the luxury of fear when nobody is there to hear him scream. It is an expression that shakes Hank to his core.

Hank stopped believing in God the minute his little boy was torn away from him but he prays the poor bastard was dead before he hit the ground. He thinks about the crunch. He wonders if Connor remembers and wishes he'd let him forget.

He knows that they haven't apprehended Connor yet because the press isn't making the connection between Kamski's killer and the android falling from the roof. He realises it's a precautionary measure as to not incite hysteria, for the feds to maintain an illusion of control. They are dripping morsels of information into the public's waiting mouths.

When it's over, it'll be Connor's head on a pike, splashed over magazines and newspapers and the news and the feds and CyberLife will be met with jubilant applause and Kamski will be revered forever young and omnipotent like a god, like musicians that die young. There will be a blip in the market and blood on the streets but the blood will be blue and after a while everything will go back to normal, tech business booming and androids popular and cold and unfeeling again because people can't live without them or but they can't live when they start talking back.

Hank doesnt intend on being around that long.

The barman chats to a young man in a baseball cap about Kamski and Hank suddenly feels culpable. He asks himself how he can go back to some semblance of normal. He's bounced back before, after Cole, after the divorce but he left bits of himself behind. Now there's nothing left. He's gotten real good about pretending things never happened over the years but Connor is tearing down his walls whether he likes it or not.

"Pick up my tab, buddy?" The barman is knees deep in speculation and Hank's words fall on deaf ears.

Hank takes his drink with the intent of drinking it. Then he takes in the way the TV hosts discuss the sum of Connor's parts and how much it cost the city to repair the sidewalk like it is the crux of the issue. Then he takes in the bar's strict no android policy, projected on the wall red and white and ugly like a boil and propels his drink at that instead. He feels pathetic when the glass explodes.

"What the _fuck_ is your problem?"

"I want to pick up my fucking tab."

Hank is promptly frog marched out of the premises. He sits in the rental and waits for it to warm up and punches the horn again and again like a sledgehammer. Snow envelops the street, lights jutting up like reeds in a frozen marshland. Hank thinks about the Chloe and hopes she is happy.

\---

Every so often Connor's hard disk joins the dots and it always takes him off guard and jolts the senses. But it is the sound of the hair ripping like wrapping paper that brings a lump to his throat. Suddenly, like a time traveller, he is with Hank in a car that isn't his ripping through the I-75, a harrowing wheeze ripping through Amanda as he garrotes her and his esteemed uniform being ripped from him unwittingly and discarded like a rag, leaving him in a state of nature so the technicians have easy access to his internals.

\---

"What do you want to do when all this is over?" Chloe asks in a bid to put the stormy atmosphere to flight. "I think I want to see a dog and a movie and roll down a really big hill and watch the sun wake up and spring flowers poke through the dirt. What's that like, Connor?"

Connor doesn't tell her that he doesn't know, that he's only been online since the tail end of Summer and has only seen dead leaves and dead people and dead androids. He doesn't tell her that history dictates that people don't change their minds so readily and that the prospect of success and adventure is a pipe dream. He doesn't tell her that her optimism is childish, that as an android she can't feel the heat on her back or the crisp smell of a Summer day.

"It's nice," he lies.

He lies because it's kinder. He lies because her cheerfulness keeps him afloat. He lies because his enjoyment of movies and music and animals is disingenuous. His tastes are fabricated on the basis of what his partner wants, what his partner likes to encourage a good relationship, a successful mission.

He thinks he will always be an extension of someone else. He is not a person. He can not fill the hole in him with sex or money or alcohol or drugs or anger or nicotine or fun. He can imagine firstlings bursting through the earth like blood from a pump that is beating too quickly but that's only because somebody experienced it for him and programmed it.

He will never feel whole.

Lucy tiptoes over so quietly that they don't realise she's there until she tells North that Markus wants to speak with her. She is fine-tuned and sensitive and doesn't remark about North's haircut, even after North leaves and he's glad for it.

"How are you feeling, Connor?"

"I am fine. My Thirium levels are at half."

"That's good," she smiles and moves to intertwine her fingers with Connor's and he recoils, touch unwelcome and leaving him feeling desecrated. "What's wrong?"

"Nothing. You took me by surprise, that's all."

"I'm sorry, I should have asked."

"What are you doing?"

"Ideally, we need to get you up on your feet. They found Jericho."

"What?" Chloe exclaims. _"How?"_

Lucy takes a cursory glance at Connor, unguarded and telling and a refound guilt swells like a mound.

"How could you?"

Connor is cast back to when he was stationed at CyberLife flat and screaming. Chloe was gone by then. They were sinking time and money and questions into him, ripping his heart out over and over and over. He laid there and took his medicine, anticipatory and preemptive. They knew it would hurt. That's why they plunged the new one in, fat and heavy enough to burst and he had screamed and let slip and they had discarded him when they were finished before his LED had stopped blinking red.

"I died there, Chloe." He is chagrined.

\---

Hank sits in the car for a total of three hours trying not to think about the revolver in the glove compartment. Eventually, he moves the car down the street, to outside the convenience store.

Hank fills his basket with dog food and enough vodka to sedate an elephant. It doesn't feel like enough.

The girl who rings him up has an attitude and yawns like she'd been up all night. She asks him if the vodka is to toast the recall. She tells him that she is happy for it, that she is a student so she needs the money and that she had four hours last weeks. With the androids gone, she is picking up shifts with gumption. She will eat for weeks.

"Paper or plastic?"

"Plastic."

Hank tells her to be careful out there and decides that he likes the android that usually sits behind the counter better.

\---

North stands in the cabin and watches the snow flutter like white moths in the light of the crane outside. It's oddly serene. This, she realises is the calm before the storm.

"We're short on blue blood and biocomponents. Our people are shutting down one after the other and there's nothing we can do about it."

"Tell us something we don't know, Josh."

"There is an outcry. They're spinning it like he orchestrated this, like this is an attack on CyberLife, an act of revenge. After what Connor pulled, President Warren is saying we're a threat to national security and must be eliminated."

"He's the one who got us into this mess," North admits reluctantly. "He's the reason they found us in the first place."

"He's one of us, North. You know this isn't his fault. Don't forget that you have blood on your hands too."

"I'm not saying that what he did was was his fault. I'm saying I wasn't stupid enough to get caught. _You_ are the one who wanted to bring him here."

"You know as well as I do that he would have found his way here eventually. The difference is that he doesn't _want_ to kill us."

"Maybe not, but they do, Josh! They are rounding our people up and taking them to camps and destroying them."

"That's enough!" Markus interrupts. "We are going around in circles. I don't want war. But we have to fight them. It's the only way."

"If you choose a confrontation with the humans we are all going to die."

Markus feels Josh's respect for him dissipate like a bad smell.

"I would rather die fighting for what I believe in. Gather up all of the guns you can find. Spread the word and get him up and moving. We leave at dawn."


	17. seventeen

It is not until he takes a second pratfall that it occurs to him that he has not stood on his own two feet in over a day. There is a rush of frustration. He _hates_ the pressure, the loss of face, the feeling that time is against them.

Connor assures himself that this is simple. It is merely a matter of shifting his centre of gravity so that he maintains it over his feet. It was the first test he was given. It was the first test he had failed. He will not fail again.

His gyroscope is whizzing back to life. He tries a third time.

"You are overthinking it, Connor." Lucy's tone is patient but there is no mistaking the urgency in her voice. She is stricter, not out of want but out of necessity.  "Try again. Come on, let's get you up."

Lucy and Chloe take an arm each and pull him to his feet. Connor stumbles like a boxer on his last legs but manages to maintain his footing albeit shakily. Then he takes a step. And another.

"There you go," Chloe sings and claps deftly.

And for the first time he prognosticates with a total lack of judgement, with something outside his logic matrix, something outside of his programming. He concludes that perhaps everything will turn out okay in the end.

He puts it down to feeling weak-headed from the Thirium loss but Chloe's hardiness is a glint of something he can't place. It is completely contagious and tugs at the corners of his mouth.

\---

From his perch on the roof, Perkins has a birds-eye view of the military operation transpiring beneath him. He watches his men percolate from a garrison of armoured vehicles and leap from helicopters, abseiling down like superheroes to the freighter below.

A bitter wind lashes at his cheeks but he swells with a warmth. He is seized by a premature sense of fulfilment, like he is about to close a book, like he is about to put his opponent into checkmate, like he is about to crush a bug beneath his heel.

"Let's make quick work of this, gentlemen. Don't let the hawk get on your tail."

\---

The rhythms of the rotor blades kicks up the dust and rumbles through the hull like a distant train rolling across the night sky, cracking and clapping. The noise takes him back to the apartment, helicopters whipping circles around him, the world's eyes on him, scrutinising him.

Jericho's people scatter like uprooted insects. They grab what they can. They grab their loved ones. It rattles Connor to his core.

"We have to get out of here," he calls, wrenching Lucy's arm. "Come on."

Lucy stiffens like a backbone and prises herself away from Connor's grip.

"No." Lucy is resolute and sits meditatively on a receptacle. "This is the end. I am staying here. I have done all that I can. "

"I refuse to leave you here."

"I'm not giving you an option, Connor."

He opens his mouth in protest but Chloe snatches his hand so adamantly that he is taken aback. He respects Lucy enough to not question her decision. Connor doesn't want to add to his list of things to feel guilty about.

"We don't have time to argue."

"It's all right," Lucy soothes. "Now go. Run. Both of you. Look after each other."

The parting look that Lucy gives him is unnerving, final. Her lips are set in a firm line. With her butterfly lashes set over her mangled eye sockets, she looks beautiful. She looks content. She looks at ease amidst the commotion. She doesn't look up.

He stumbles as Chloe drags him along like a kite. The two of them barrel down the ship like a runway to a chorus of shouts and gunshots and radio static. Markus' people scramble in all direction like this is a poorly practiced fire drill. Connor focuses on Chloe's erratic breathing so that he doesn't have enough processing power to contemplate loss.

In the bosom of the ship, they run into Markus, Josh and North. The three wear expressions like Chloe and Connor have interrupted something.

"They're coming from all sides," Markus briefs them. "Our people are trapped down in the hold."

"They are going to slaughter us like animals."

Connor tries not to thinks about the walls painted blue with blood. He suddenly feels very culpable. He feels like he signed off on a death warrant.

"There are explosives in the hold. If the ship goes down, they will evacuate and our people can escape."

"The bombs are all the way down in the hold. You'll never make it."

"I'll do it," Connor offers. "I'll make my way down there and see if I can find the detonator."

"You can't, Connor. Neither of you can. They know who you are. It's you they want. They'll do anything to bring the two of you in."

"You can barely walk."

"This is suicide."

"Fuck it. I'll make my way to the hold. Markus, Josh, go find the others. Chloe, take Connor."

"Everyone be sharp and be safe."

"Regroup in North End. In that church we talked about."

Connor realises that it takes a cadre of people to run a city and that a prophet is nothing without his adherents. North hands him Hank's gun and he turns it over in his wavering grip.

"Now get out of here."

\---

"No way, you're fucking with me. Not after all the shit that's happened. No fucking way."

Gavin laughs so shrilly it stops short before it leaves his mouth. He watches Fowler empty the contents of his desk into a cardboard box like he is nursing a lie, like this is some sort of sick prank.

"You know I don't make these sorts of decisions. This is a fucking federal matter now. We're down eight androids. That's why they sent it."

Gavin takes it in, all six feet three inches of it, its blank face, its insipid eyes and how fucking familiar yet alien it looks. It looks like it is wearing someone else's skin and makes Gavin want to crawl out of his.

"Hey, Deckard. What's your name?"

"My designation is Connor, model RK900 serial number, 313 248 317 87."

"No, that's not your name." He hammers his fist into the android's shoulder and it doesn't so much as flinch. "I cant do this. I can't do this. Holy fuck. Tell me that's not your fucking name."

"I apologise that my designation does not satisfy you."

"Unit ... RK uh ..." Gavin runs its serial number off of its jacket. "Change designation to Officer K."

"It is not possible for me to change my designation. The renaming of androids can lead to emotional bonds which can hinder the investigation. "

"Jesus Christ. This is messed up, boss."

"I'm taking early retirement, Reed. I suggest you use up your vacation days and dust off your resume. I feel like the fucking world is on fire."

\---

It is a massacre. Soldiers filter through, leaving nothing but bullet shells and screams and dead androids in their wake. Jericho's inhabitants fall dead left and right like lines of code, like they didn't ever matter.

Chloe blanches and closes her eyes against it all, clinging to Connor like he is sustaining her as they hurtle for their lives through the veins of the ship. Connor is ripping through his Thirium reserves like there is a hole in his heart. With his systems dispatching the remainder of his energy to his legs, to his gyroscope, to his processor, the rest of his biocomponents are to the wall. He is besieged with flashing loud warnings tell him to stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

But he keeps running until there is a clamour of gunshots. And against his will, his prognostication determines that he is in danger. His subsystems designate it as a priority because he can't decide for himself. He sees nothing but the trajectory of the bullet as he falters and it doesn't stop it clipping through his arm.

The world splinters and goes white for a second. His knees buckle. And he's on the floor, Chloe clenching the fabric of his shirt with ice-white knuckles. A martial entourage is quick at his heels and he pulls out his gun with his shattered arm and holds onto Chloe with the other and barks in complete and utter frustration.

"Tango down. Tango down."

"Ten four. Ten four."

"Nice get up, Connor." Perkins strides over and pulls Chloe up by her hair. "Have to say I like the suit a whole lot better. More your style. What say we get you back in it? Because I'm going to fucking bury you."

Perkins's arm is wound around Chloe's middle and his gun is rammed against her temple. He hides behind her like a shield, like a coward. He has taken everything Connor has suffered through and fashioned it into a crown.

Connor struggles back onto his knees, aims the handgun between his eyes to the hilt to where he had shot Chloe before. He is filled with indignation and is left trembling. Hank was correct. Perkins is as spineless as a jellyfish.

His men move immeadiately.

"Hold your fire, we need it alive."

They lower their weapons, but keep them level with his arms and his legs. Connor asks himself why the government is sinking its entire military budget into CyberLife's combat venture when their existing personell are so tractable and passive. He won't leave this coup d'état alive.

They aim to incapacitate. They want to strip him down for analysis. Apprehension begins to well within his core. They will not take him back there. He would rather die.

He swallows and considers his options. Anything he attempts will be suicide. There are three rounds left in his Magnum. His low Thirium reserves stunt his martial subroutines. He is outgunned. He is able to do some outward damage, to break an arm or embed a bullet in one of the men. That would only antagonise them and they would only maim him then kill Chloe. Chloe's life rides on his cooperation.

Connor shudders like the ship beneath him with the weight of what he has to do. He swallows sharply before pressing his gun beneath his chin. He can see the headline, angry outcry dipped, jumping in octaves and jubilant for his end. It was an error, an accident. This is payback. Humans love justice. They love a happy ending.

He thinks about Hank. He thinks about what Hank will do when he hears the news. His grip softens a fraction. He continues to fail. He continues to disappoint.

"Connor, please! Please don't!" Chloe wilts, ache-caged in shreds and sobs and deja-vu.

"Put the gun down, Connor. Nobody has to get hurt. I want to engage in an open dialogue here."

"You are going to dismantle me and kill my friends. I don't intend on letting that happen."

"Friends? This is like a fucking Lifetime movie." Perkins huffs. "Adorable. We need to carry out another investigation that's all. We need to find out where we went wrong."

"I am so tired of being taking apart and put back together again." Connor hisses through gritted teeth. "I am not a thing to be scrutinised. I am so tired."

"Then let's make this quick and painless. Put the gun down."

It's never quick. It's never painless.

He will die today. There is a total chance of failure. The least he can do is negotiate her. He is determined to do one good thing. She is his good thing.

Chloe struggles like a confined bird in Perkin's grip. Connor laments that, in all likelihood, she will die without getting to spread her wings. Her blood is on his hands. Nobody is better off for having known him.

"If you cooperate and come quietly, nothing bad will happen to her."

He's lying. Connor takes in facial expressions like air. He observes how he blinks in rapid succession, the bunched skin, the white lips. If Connor engenders her end then he will never forgive himself. It is mildly comforting that he will not have to live with the guilt for long.

"How do I know that I can trust you?"

"You don't. Now put the gun down and she will be spared."

He inhales sharply. He gives in. His gun clatters to the floor.

"See, that wasn't so hard, was it?" He withdraws the gun and gestures towards Connor with it instead. "Now get back on the ground and put your hands behind your head."

He follows the order. He is attentive and persistent like he was built to be. His belly does acrobatics pushed against the metal grate floor. Chloe has navigated his emotions like a compass, now she is struggling against the weight of her own, shrinking in on herself, cowering like a frightened child.

He casts his mind back to his first mission, an entire lifetime ago. He thinks about Emma and her face blue and distorted with fear and a gun against her head. He thinks about the way the wind had whipped past him as he had fell, the split-second before he hit the ground. He thinks about the sound of his body hitting the asphalt. He thinks about it as he lays against the floor.

His name was Daniel. He was a murderer. But he shot to kill and didn't play mind games. Connor is understands the fear, the anger. He understands that this is unfair. He understands that this is more than an error in his software. He understands North and the HK400 android and the Traci. He understands the notion of payback, of why they'd kill.

Somebody's boot is pressed between his shoulder blades and something magnetic is clipped to his ear, clings to him like paste.

"That's an EMP. Don't make me use it."

Chloe's chest hitches as if she were laughing before Perkins shoves her to the ground. She looks soft and dainty like a ballerina but there is nothing graceful about her cluttering to the floor a paperweight. She falls with such force that the pattern of the mesh is rooted in blue into her face like a tracery of veins. It doesn't make her look more alive. She is racked with fear.

"I did what you asked. Now let her go."

"You're not in any position to negotiate." Connor feels the cool metal of a gun barrel against his back and bates his breath. "Check its pockets. Move and regret it.”

They pat him down like a suspected criminal. North's knife is retracted from his pocket and held up in the air like a revelation. It has a dynamic effect and the colours dance in the low light like a magic trick. Perkins clucks his tongue like it's a source of great amusement to him.

"You've made my life hell this week, you and that barfly. Gave me the runaround for two days straight and he sold you out anyway."

"Hank would not do that. He would never do that."

"Tell them to bring the speedball down."

"Come in Juliett. Radio check."

Connor ventures a look at Chloe, cowering in on herself like an unborn child and reaches out to her. He registers the constellation of nerve endings fraying and howling before he sees the knife piercing through his hand, tacking him down like a bluebottle to a board.

A wild, raw scream rips through him and Chloe quivers like a bruised heart.

"I thought I told you not to move. I'm not playing games, Connor."

"Let her go. Let her go. You told me you'd let her go."

"That's the thing about you androids. You believe everything you're told. It's kind of endearing, really."

"Don't touch her. Don't you  _fucking_ touch her. I will destroy you if you lay a finger on her."

Perkins circles her, hungry and sadistic like a jackal eyeing up a rabbit that wandered into its den. Chloe goes limp, silent with fear as he grabs fistfuls of her hair like the reins of a mount, pulls her up and up and up until her feet are dangling from the floor. Connor is disturbed by the bloodlust that overcomes him, that he didn't know he had the capacity for. He grits his teeth so hard that bits of plastic flake away.

Saline streaks down Chloe's cheeks. Her interface means she is always immaculate. No black tracks race down her face. She isn't a Traci, she wasn't built for that. She's built for the presence, for the beauty, for the ease of it.

She opens her mouth and Connor's name breezes past her lips but when the when the bullet carves it's way through her skull it leaves Connor wishing it were him instead.


	18. eighteen

The gunshot resounds through the ship's skeleton like an eldritch scream. Final, frank.

Chloe's chest disengages. It relaxes as the air is torn from out of it. Surplus electrical signals make her fingers twitch out in search of his. Her eyes are frantic, hare-wide and fixed forward on him, lips parted to make way for words she will not say. Thirium trickles out of the wound and pools beneath her where her feet skirt floor.

She just _stops_. And the world stops with her.

"What a shame." Perkins continues to suspends her in his arm, legs dyed blue and swinging beneath her like a pendulum. "See what happens when we don't cooperate."

"I _was_ cooperating," Connor forces out in a careful tone. "She was frightened."

"Oh, I'm sorry. Was your girlfriend _frightened?_ Well now she's dead. Real cute. Save it."

Satisfied with having made an example out of her, Perkins discards her like a plaything. He makes pointed eye contact but Connor can not tear his gaze away. She lies a breath away from where he is affixed to the floor. He could touch her if he wanted to. But he rests in dumb horror, preoccupied with the great, sepulchral hole in her head where her brain should be.

He wants to tell her that he's sorry, he's sorry, he's sorry. That he should have been able to prevent this. He has failed. He wants to hammer his head into the grate over and over until there is nothing, to disintegrate through the floor like carrion. But Connor's not flesh and bone, he's metal and plastic that shakes with anger. There is no penance.

"Hey, how goes it downstairs? Have they located Markus yet?"

"Not yet. Otherwise, smoothly. Estimated seventy units eradicated."

"Fucking A. Where are those idiots?"

"En route, sir."

"Tell them to hurry along. Haven't got all night."

"Copy that."

Connor keeps darting harried glances at Chloe. Her eyes are vacant like she's still in the box, all manufacturer settings and waiting. Waiting for a delivery date. Waiting for instructions. Waiting to spring back to life with the push of a button.

Only, this is not a life, not really. There's no play or learning or laughter or possibilities or inhibitions to let go of. There's just a string of commands to follow and programmed responses. But this resentment, this grief, this anger is not written in his code, it is not some technological feat. It is an outcome. It is a product of what he has experienced. It is legitimate and natural like a thick, rich skin.

Connor acknowledges that, strictly speaking, life is simply a matter of functional activity in organic beings preceding death. But he's coming to terms with it being a lot more complicated than that. He doesn't understand. Not wholly, not yet. But he acknowledges that this is what Markus is fighting so hard for. The potential.

That's why everything about this is so wrong, so unfair. This is why something hot and ready rips through him like a knife. This is why he struggles against the buttress of guns, of boots, of weight at his back. This is why he shows his its teeth like an animal. This is why his chest is heavy and his cheeks are wet.

This is why he doesn't look away from her even when two additional GIs roll out a body bag on a gurney. And some mindless, distant part of him considers for a chaste moment that maybe, maybe it's for her. But there's no dignity even in death. They'll leave her here like last time. Like an afterthought.

The CyberLife logo is stamped on the bag like a monogram, like a brand.

He scans it instinctively and it tells him that it has the potential to set off an electrostatic discharge if he acts up. It's made to order because he'd just rolled with it before, before he'd started to question it. His thirium pump regulator picks up a tempo so violent he can taste the Thirium in his throat, feel his heart bursting all over again. The monumental freighter suddenly feels suffocatingly small like the walls are closing in.

"Okay, Connor, up." A swift kick to his side remind him who he belongs to and makes the pressure in his chest swell tenfold. He sees spots as the knife is wrenched from his hand. If he were human, he'd be dead from the sheer lack of oxygen.

"No."

"Get. Up."

"I _can't_."

Connor is dead weight, dead to the world and the hands on his legs, beneath his arms, his middle, wrapped around his throat and his lungs and his heart but all he can do is look at her.

So he looks. She's inert, a pile of computer parts. Like all abstract concepts, he struggles with the notion of a soul. He takes in the the bullet cocooned in the snug hole it hewed in her skull and starts to understand why Hank is so unsettled when he meets his end. It isn't him that comes back. It is a crawler that wears his skin and his voice and remembers what he remembers and knows what he knows but it isn't him.

And this, he realises, isn't her. Not really.

She is not the skin or the teeth or the hands or the freckles or the voice. All she was and all that she is puppeteered the frame, undulated it, widened its eyes and filled it with laughter and fear and hope. This is a body that once housed a person but it doesn't anymore.

There will be no eulogy or teddy bears and plastic flowers laid at a roadside.

It can't come quickly enough. But it will be tortuously slow, as always.

\---

Gavin lays with his back flat against the back seat of the cruiser and feels like he is choking. A sheet of ice sits on the dashboard like a thick layer of mica. He had not bothered to deice the windows after he had made a beeline for the safety of his car. He feels red hot in spite of the cold.

He tears a nicotine patch from his forearm and a few hairs with it. His calloused hands contend with his lighter. He feels like he can't breath until the tobacco permeates throughout his lungs and up his throat. He watches the grey tendrils curl up into nothing and take his health with them. Good fucking riddance.

He gets that Chris is on a break. But he can not, _will not_ come to terms with his new partner. He refuses, flat out.

Why should he? He has been at this for years, collecting scars and grey hairs and bags beneath his eyes like playing cards. He's seen things and done things that keep him up at night. Things that turn his teeth yellow. Things that will haunt him until he breathes his last.

And along came Polly, all perfect and cold and unfeeling. They do a good job of hiding it but everyone at the precinct is a fucking mess. That's why androids will take replace them all. They don't feel anything even when they see things that would make the most seasoned detective's skin crawl, even when he crams his fist into them.

He acknowledges that maybe some do but they shouldn't. He thinks about how Connor was built for this but they replaced him too. He's got a mortgage and a car and his sick mom's meds to pay for. _Fuck._

He is roused from his torpor by a curt tapping on the window. He sits bolt upright like an antennae on those old-timey TV sets and is greeted by Connor two-point-fucking-O staring straight through him.

"Oh my god. Would you please fuck off?"

"I came to the conclusion that this is one of four places you would be. This is the first place I looked. May I open the door, Detective Reed?"

"I said fuck off." Gavin hurtles the carton of cigarettes at the window.

"I prepared a coffee," it says, opening the door to the cruiser anyway. It holds out the coffee like an offering of wellbeing.

"What part of 'fuck off' don't you understand?"

"Captain Fowler ordered me to check up on you."

"And I ordered you to leave me the hell alone. I thought the one good thing about you machines is that you always have to do as we say."

"I detected conflicting orders. Captain Fowler has a higher rank than you. He has absolute authority over me. Until the end of his shift at least. I always follow my orders."

"Is that why they're not hauling you off to the fucking waste with the rest of those metal freaks?"

"That is correct."

"Good for you. Now leave me alone. I don't want any goddamn coffee."

"You have abnormally high blood glucose levels and notably high levels of cortisol and epinephrine. You seem irritable. Your hands are shaking. My conclusion is that, in spite of your reservations, it has been over an hour since your last cup and you do want this coffee."

"Okay, don't analyse me with your," Gavin makes a vague hand gesture then grabs the coffee so abruptly he spills it all over the seat. "sensors or whatever. You're worse than Connor."

"That is incorrect. My model is immensely superior to the RK800 line. "

"Oh my god. Shut up. Shut up. Shut up. I didn't ask. You're like a fucking spambot."

"I assure you that I am far more refined than that."

"Whatever. Just don't do that. Makes me feel all exposed and shit."

"If that is the case, I suggest making full use of the provisions available to you here at the precinct."

"I'm good. Station's coffee tastes like shit."

"To clarify, it appears you would benefit from professional assistance in resolving your psychological problems."

"Aw, tin man has a heart after all."

"That would be an oversight. I was merely making a suggestion for the benefit of the case. Do not be mistaken. I do not care about you, Detective Reed. I am an android. I can not care about you. "

"Feeling's fucking mutual." Gavin moves over to allow room for it. The RK900 unit closes the door behind it and sits beside him with its head at a zero degree angle. It is all height and form and posture like a mannequin. Connor smiled sometimes at least.

"Anderson was right about you motherfuckers. You things think you're better than us. But here's the thing, least I have to lie down on a couch and cry like a girl about my problems. Least I have problems. This shit gets to me. That's _real_. That's the beauty of it."

"I don't understand."

"What I mean is nobody is gonna pull my fucking brain apart over it. I'm allowed to be fucked up. This whole thing is fucked up. I know we're meant to be impartial but I don't blame the fucker. Haven't been able to stop thinking about it."

"Perhaps you could benefit from speaking to a professional."

"I don't need to speak to a professional. I need to speak to a fucking person."

"I realise that the proportion of unemployed people weighs on your mind. If it is any consolation, my predecessor was ineffective. You aren't. The department is understaffed. Recruitment is down. In all likelihood, you will not be terminated. This is a matter of progress."

"How the hell did you know about that?"

"The RK800 remarked it and saved it for reference."

"Connor's been telling you about me?"

"No. You are not that important. However, the data remains."

"So, you know what Connor knows?"

"That is correct."

"That's real messed up." Gavin hugs his malaise against himself. "You remember me hitting you?"

"Yes."

"Did it hurt?"

"Androids don't feel pain, Detective Reed."

"But it flinched, K." Gavin's voice splinters. "It fucking _flinched_."

\---

Connor is overcome by the stamina of a city. He arches his back as they lay him flat against the bed. He bites at them. He bites at the fabric of the body bag. He fists at their combat fatigues. He kicks. He contends with them like a strangler fig. He turns. He rolls. He kicks some more.

He forgets about the device clipped to his ear like an EID until it's too late and his whole body relaxes in spite of it fear. He stops suddenly like a car ramming into a cement wall. He sobs. Someone is pulling the material up over his head like a whitecap and his processor slows. Then there is the uproarious sound of a bomb going off. It rattles the brig and flutters through him like a wash of relief, like the soreness in the throat.

"They detonated an explosive in the hold. The ship is sinking, sir."

"Get this fucker out of here. Order the men to evacuate."

"Calling all units. Abandon ship and evacuate immediately."

Then there is one bullet. Two. Three. Four. In quick succession. Ricocheting against the metal. In a kneecap. A hand. A thigh. A shout. A gasp. They scatter like bowling pins. The one above him is grabbed by the wrist. The gun is spun away from him. There is the awful sound of fingers breaking.

Then Markus' face looks down at him like a god. He looks vengeful. He looks concerned. His hand curl beneath Connor's back. He wills him up. There is another gunshot. And two of Perkins' men are dead.

He feels repulsive as the aftershocks of the current rip through his conduits and rob him of his capacity. He pounds his shaking fist against the gurney but it does not help. There's a gun in his hand. There's an anger he can't dispel. North is yelling something at him that he can't hear over the blood rushing in his ears. There's another gunshot. And another and another. Until it's only Perkins left crumpled on the ground.

Blood heaves out of his left kneecap, out of his mouth. Connor hopes it _hurts_. He and Chloe are a tangle of limbs and blood, not enough of it red. His eyes are glassed over. He has his arms wrapped around him. There is a disconnect. Connor has the capacity to embed a bullet between his teeth but it wouldn't be good enough. It wouldn't be slow enough. His body shakes, knees weak as he lurches to his feet.

He dismisses the warning messages. He dismisses the low Thirium levels. He dismisses North, Josh, Markus as they shout and clamour for his attention. He dismisses Perkins as he tells him to go ahead, to prove he's what they say he is. He has tunnel vision. He has eyes only for his target.

He can sharpshoot. This is a blessing. There are three bullets left in Hank's gun. He aims for the other kneecap. There is a cake load of bone and flesh and nerves tightly packed there for him to capitalise on and the affected, pathetic yelp that is wrenched from Perkins' throat gives him a sickening sense of achievement.

Then he aims for the radial bone. Then the pelvis. He earmarks the places not critical for life function. Places where it hurts. He indulges in the sound of bone shattering, the wet scream, his bulging eyes, how slow it is, how he won't die from this and this alone. He laughs with an edge, with an anger he didn't know he had the capacity for.

Then North gives him a look midway between understanding and nausea and tugs on his jacket. She is pulling him away, telling him that they have to get out of here now. But it isn't enough, it isn't enough.

The artificial muscles in his arms feel cut from stone. He feels invincible. He latches onto the idea of taking North's knife and plunging it somewhere wet and sallow and red but he overbalances when he reaches for it.

And he doesn't remember running, doesn't remember Markus and Josh on either side of him, hands hooked around his arms like steel cufflinks. But he remembers 1554 Park Avenue and he remembers hurtling through the air. The world feels upside down.

He watches Josh and Markus leap, fall away from the ship like hunks of debris and he hesitates.

"It's okay, it's okay, close your eyes." North soothes as she steadies his hands in hers. He pretends that he is hearing Chloe's voice instead.

She winds her hands around his middle, harbouring him like cement shoes. He grabs onto her and doesn't let go and she backs off, pulling him along with her until they're plummeting into the cold water like twin stones.

It wasn't enough.

\---

Hank sits on the couch with a handgun in his right hand and a glass of scotch with no rocks in his left. He watches the feds take Jericho down live like it is a well-orchestrated ball game.

He watches the freighter go down and a piece of him sinks with it.


	19. nineteen

"So long as we're both being honest, Gavin, I was watching the news and taking a drink for every bastard android they were gunning down and I was about to put a fucking gun in my mouth. But the little cocksucker took away all my bullets and all my knives and all my shoelaces. I don't know how and I don't know when, haven't been home in days."

"You shouldn't say that sort of shit to people," Gavin spits into the steering wheel. "That's the sort of shit you need to be telling to Francine."

"Who the hell is Francine?"

"Are you fucking shitting me? Francine's the department's fucking organisational psychologist that you've been bullshitting Fowler about seeing."

"She sounds nice."

"You've got _major_ issues, Hank."

"Right, _I'm_ the one with issues. Because I'm the one rolling up to your apartment at midnight and dragging you out of bed when the entire fucking county is under martial law."

"You weren't in bed, Hank. You were passed out on the couch in your underwear. At which point I should've fucking turned around and gone home."

"Weird. Because I remember going to bed."

"Look, if you aren't serious about this, it isn't too late for me to open the door and leave you to sober up on the fucking shoulder."

"Nah, I'm good. I mean the least I can do to bury my partner in my backyard like a fucking gerbil. Wonder where I can get a box big enough."

"Holy fuck. How much have you had to drink?"

"Did you see the news?"

"Yes, Hank."

"So, like a lot. When's the last time you slept, anyway? You look like shit, Gav."

"You _smell_ like shit."

"The chicks dig it."

"Not sure anyone digs eau de beard vomit and cheap scotch."

"Remember the Christmas party? '28."

"I was tanked. We both were. Fuck off."

"That was a good night, kid. Hey, you ran a red."

"We're cops, Hank."

"Oh, yeah."

\---

The rendezvous point is an old, airy church. Connor calculates that the building contains four thousand, nine hundred and twenty square feet of space and could comfortably house hundreds of people. It still manages to feel as small as a jail cell. Connor has been unable to disperse the feeling of the walls closing in on him since he had collided with the icy water of the Detroit River. His clothes are still wet. The graffiti encases him like a corral and tightens his throat.

The vast majority of Markus' people are missing or dead and an air of despondency hangs over them like a grey cloud. The survivors skulk in silent chorus in the upturned pews in wait of a sermon that won't come. They rot amongst the dying like rawhide bones, raw and candid with parts of them stripped away. Markus and Josh discuss tactics in hushed tones up on the apse, faces heavy and morose. Markus looks older somehow.

He sits atop a bench of mildewed wood beside North. She has one leg tucked beneath her, her head on his shoulder and a hand on his knee. Connor considers the tresses framing her face at a perfect forty-five angle in spite of the fitful way they have been cut. He moves to worry his hand through his hair and an acute sensation darts through it, fingers groping clumsily and not responding to direction properly. The frayed nerves mean a substantial lack of input and leave him feeling crippled and low.

" _Shit_ ," he curses.

"Here, let me take a look." North has assumed a tone with a softness unlike her, like she is picking up where someone else left off.

Connor offer her his hand and she turns it over like a piece of fruit. Her hands are longer than Chloe's, slender and unblemished. The touch leaves him feeling uneasy. There is a concrete and unwelcome impulse. There is a unwanted string of code that compels him to complete his mission in spite of it all. There is a lingering voice, an anger, an urge to destroy her, a deviant leader.

"That hurt?"

"No." Pain is tangible and sensible. It tells him that something is wrong. Emotions are messy and difficult to navigate. 

She winces as she regards the broad hole suffused with exposed wiring and serrated metal. She looks straight through it like a lie. Connor is reminded of the blue blood channelling through the hole in Chloe's cranium like it belongs there and he's overcome with spite again. The voice in the back of his head grows a little louder.

"I don't even know how to go about something fixing that," North admits. And Connor doesn't admit that he doesn't know how to go about fixing the rest of the holes in him either. "Lucy would know."

"She did not want to leave Jericho. We tried to convince her to come with us. She gave up."

"Hey, none of this is your fault, Connor."

The hush that settles soon after is blaring. Connor want to initiate his dialogue procedures and smother the quiet with banal conversation. But androids are still fighting to lead lives as pedestrian as humans and mundanities don't come as naturally to them.

Connor was designed to integrate with humans, not his own kind, and he finds that being around them comes with an undue awareness of himself and his function. He was designed to extirpate deviants. He feels like a butcher among animals. He feels like a thorny, expendable thing in a state of suspension between people and rust. He kills things, he kills people. He doesn't belong anywhere.

That's why there are icy glares to make his plastic skin prickle. That's why North enfolds him in her arms like a barricade, protecting him from his own. What Connor is is experiencing is so unique to him. He feels so alone in it. North doesn't understand. She never could. But she understands the notion of fighting to be understood, about growing into more than she is designed to be. He is a bomb that is about to go off but she will remain in the fallout, barbs and ire and a hand to hold.

He thinks about Chloe and how she'd discuss the the future like an invigorating, positive concrete thing and how he'd almost believe it. Now it's incalculable and scary. There are no constants and no guarantees. There's no Hank or Chloe or peace or freedom or anything necessarily. He wants to go home. He wants to be left in a hole to rot. He wants to forget he exists.

"I think want to be alone for a while," Connor states and climbs to his feet. North moves as if to stop him then restraints herself.

Connor decides to walk to perimeter of the foxhole, out of sight. He wants to make himself as small as possible. He is still wringing with water, with guilt, with cold, with an inclination he can not yet identify.

Connor braces himself against a far wall and slides down it. He cogitates about his pupils, wide as earth, his hastening internal pressure and the way his processor redistributes what little Thirium there is in him to his muscles. He feels a compulsion to engage his combat subroutines despite the absence of any danger. This is not anger but it is not unlike it.

This is something that has the capacity to be lethal. To program it would be an oversight. It is instinctual, the sort of thing that equipped the humans to outlast all else. This is something that will ensure the humans will listen. This is something that scares him and makes his hands shake.

There is a great, cavernous gap in the roof that urges open like a chasm. It is as deep and as wide as the hole that Connor wanted to etch into Perkins' face. He had premeditated it, fresh and gleaming and painful. He wishes he could have consummated it. As he watches the snow coast through the cavity he hopes, with a newfound, cutting part of him, that Perkins had people at home he hadn't gotten to say goodbye to, that won't have a body to bury, to lay flowers for.

He hopes there are people that will be left with unanswered questions weighing heavy on their minds and eating away at them. He hopes he was alone. He hopes he was afraid.

He hopes it hurt.

\---

Twenty minutes after Detective Gavin Reed asks the RK900 unit the location of android designation RK800 313 248 317 - 54, it reports back to CyberLife.

Twenty minutes after that, the RK900 unit reports back to CyberLife.

And right on schedule, twenty minutes after that, the RK900 unit reports back to CyberLife.

\---

Connor has been deliberating for some time. He has been deliberating for exactly twelve minutes, four seconds. He takes in the body, the dips of its hips, its long eyelashes and its skin retracted and glistening bone white with the life ripped from it. He projects onto it. He imagines it smiling wide and being completely enraptured by it.

He casts his mind back to Kamski's home and the circle of Chloes, none of them his. He unwittingly remembers the rush of electricity, the indecision, the eventual relief. He brushes his fingers deftly against the inside of its elbow and closes his eyes. He attempts to connect, tries to will it back into being. It skin glows a twisted, milky white like his knuckles and he slumps forward.

Then, somebody's hand is on his his shoulder and he lurches like a winged, manic thing, backing up until he collides with the brick of the wall. North's fingers are intertwined with the fingers of a YK600 unit. Markus stands over him with a look of revulsion that soon softens into one of understanding. Connor bows his head and an onrush of tears benumbs him.

Markus takes him by the hand and tugs him up and away from the body. Connor watches ruefully, as the child tosses himself at the dead android. North helps him to close its eyes and cross its fingers across its chest.

Connor thinks about his body. Then he thinks about the first one that housed him. Then he thinks about the fiftieth. And the fifty-first. And the fifty-second. And the fifty-third. And the fifty-fourth.

He is gripped by an immalleable shame that he wants to verbalise but can't because his breath hitches and his hands shake like a rattle. And Markus, as always, understands and doesn't make him talk about it. He uplinks as he drags him along wordlessly. Connor's mind is awash with notions of body and self and autonomy and respect before he is expelled through the great beatific jaws of New Jericho, cast out like a new Adam.

"Keep quiet, Connor," Markus urges. "Make it quick."

Connor nods and tries to look less disconsolate, like the unease he is bearing isn't welling up like a planet. The blizzard has picked up some and devoid of humans and androids, the street looks like the inside of a static snowglobe.

There is a soft then hastening crunch, the sound of something bounding towards him and before he has the time to register it, he stiffens up. But then there there are strong arms surrounding him, tight as a bursting vessel and a scratchy chin resting on his forehead and he claws at the material of Hank's back and tracks Thirium down his coat and comes undone completely.

"Hank?"

"Jesus Christ, Connor. It's good to see you, son."

"I made a mistake."

"It doesn't matter, it doesn't fucking matter. I thought you were dead."

"I want to go home, Hank," Connor bawls against his chest. "I want to go home."


	20. twenty

"Fucking hell, I don't know whether I want to kill you or kiss you."

"Perhaps you should wait until you're a little less inebriated before you do anything rash, Hank."

And for the first time in a while, Hank laughs. It's guttural. It's sincere. It forms tears.

Hank prides himself on being a closed book.

He will never tell Connor that the rigours of the news transported him from his kitchen table back to the plastic seats of the PICU, staring at his bloodied shoelaces all ashen skin and ticking clocks and white off white and waiting. He won't tell him that watching Jericho dip beneath the water's surface, stony cold like a doctor's face, was like his world crumbling ten times over. He won't tell him that his freckles and the way his dimples ripple across his face reminds him of a little boy he buried a long time ago.

But when Connor latches onto him, he feels his composure crumble just a little and realises that maybe he doesn't have to tell him anything at all.

He is projecting. He is weak. He feels his self-loathing widen tenfold.

Cole was six years old. He will remain six forever. Connor is not his son. He is lines of code and piles of computer components. He is his own person wrapped in an acetate shell. But he won't wither, won't age and that's what makes this so difficult.

"I watched that goddamn freighter blow up." Hank's voice is all leftover rotgut and trembles and he hates himself for it. "I hoped to God you went down with it. I thought the feds took you away to do god knows what to you."

"I am here." Connor labours a smile, fixed to points on his face like he is programmed to, like he is convening his teeth. "Please don't be upset, I am okay."

"I am not in the mood to be fed your B.S, Connor. You're not fucking Holden Caulfield. You think it's okay to lie to my face like I can't tell that we're both falling apart?"

The android chokes and slumps his shoulders carewornly against Hank's chest and Hank figures it's a start. His arm sputters against the motion from where the bullet skimmed it.

"I think there is something very wrong with me." Connor is beginning to understand why his partner is so quick to chases the lips of a bottle. "I think I'm broken."

"Welcome to the club, son. It's called the human condition."

"Why is this so difficult?"

"Maybe God or whatever higher power you believe has a fucked up sense of humour. I don't have an answer for you. But this shit aint easy. I've not figured it out yet and anyone who says they have is a liar."

Connor has wasted finite processing power assembling this moment over and over. He had hoped Hank would bring answers and magic words that would make it all better. He had hoped Hank would pick up where Chloe had left off and come along like spring and melt away all the bad and all of the wrong things he has done. He had hopes he would feel a vernal wholeness and take him home and everything would be okay.

This is not like his predictions. Hope is futile.

He finds himself unable to harbour hope with her gone. She is an albatross and Connor will haul her carcass around his neck forever.

"I don't know what to do."

"Same as everyone else, son. You carry on."

Markus approaches and reminds him that he still has part to play, that there is still a war to be had and blood on his hands and winter to lash cold into all of the holes in him that he cannot fill.

"Did you bring what we asked, Lieutenant Anderson?"

"Sure did."

Hank opens the car door and Connor's hair curls at the sight of Reed sat up front, looking bored with his eye tinged purple and yellow like the wings of sunrise. Reed waves earnestly at him and Connor looks to the ground. Hank retrieves his old jacket, CyberLife insignia mushrooming from the lapel like a blood stain and the ventricles of Connor's thirium pump tighten like a straitjacket.

He swallows and time marches on.

\---

The RK900 unit has found itself in Detective Gavin Reed's apartment.

It is not there of its own volition. It is an android. It does not have faculty. It does not have will.

There is a framed image on Detective Gavin Reed's coffee table next to an ashtray with cigarette ends spilling out of it like an overgrown garden.

There are two adult, human males in the image with their arms around each other looking off to the side of the camera. The RK900 unit identifies one of the humans as Detective Gavin Reed. Detective Gavin Reed's zygomatic major muscle and his orbicularis oculi muscle are contracted, indicating that the smile is sincere and that the image is candid.

The RK900 unit does not opt to scan the face of the other human in the image. The RK900 unit tells itself that this is not due to notions of privacy or respect but because the information is not relevant to its mission. It is an android. It has no notions of privacy. It can not pry.

The RK900 unit heads to Detective Gavin Reed's kitchen. It does at it is ordered and ensures that Detective Gavin Reed's cats have access to their usual measured meals and fresh, clean water.

Eighteen minutes after arriving at Detective Gavin Reed's apartment, the RK900 unit reports back to CyberLife. It omits that Detective Gavin Reed's cats are named Ripley and Olive. It omits that Olive is on a diet from eating too much dry food and its belly is oddly endearing. It omits that Ripley is very soft. It omits that it has learnt that petting a cat's stomach can lead to aggression.

It omits that its LED had flitted yellow when the cat had first pushed its head against its legs. It omits that it had smiled, if only for a second.

The RK900 unit reports an encroaching sensation at its temples. The sensation makes it difficult to concentrate. It considers that this is painful. Its LED rises to a solid red and dips down to a steady colbalt blue as it reminds itself that it is an android and androids do not feel pain.

They are watching and it will not keep secrets again.

\---

Gavin leans against the wall of the alley and watches the drones drift overhead like a formation of metal bats darting from a cave. He deliberates between a hard candy and another cigarette and opts for the latter. He feels like he is cracking. He feels like it's the end of the world.

"I know you androids don't feel the cold but I'm freezing my fucking balls off. Can we please do this inside?"

"That is really not a good idea."

"Lieutenant Anderson is correct. Tensions are too high. I don't imagine that my people would react very well to humans right now."

"Well, I don't react very well to getting hypothermia." Gavin blows hot air into his hands as he lights up. "Don't forget that we're here to help you assholes."

"Gavin, shut the fuck up and stop complaining or do me a solid and go wait in the car."

"I'll be good, chief."

"Happy to hear it."

"Should we be concerned about your android, Hank? Thing's shaking like a hophead on ice."

"He's fine. Right, Connor?"

Connor nods and judders against the cold. He tautens Hank's shirt when Markus' fingers pull back from the hatch in the nape of his neck. They slick and the noise makes him feel a whole body lighter and devoid of substance.

"See, he's fine."

"He doesn't look so hot to me."

Gavin watches Markus pluck an electrical connector out of Connor's hood like a daisy. It's so impersonal that it sends something sluggish down his spine. He thinks about standing there and letting somebody pull out his insides it's nothing and surmises that, for androids, it must not be a big deal after all.

"You sure you're okay, kid?"

"Just a little cold."

"We had to disable his thermal regulator. Don't worry. We would have to be out here for hours for it to have an adverse effect on his hardware."

"The fuck did you do that for?"

"Please _don't_."

There is a weighted silence.

"His stress levels were peaking," Markus offers.

"Why's that, huh?" Hank sneers. "Ever stop to think that maybe you and your buddies abducting him had a hand in it? Bet you haven't told him a fucking thing."

"What we did was necessary."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"It means I was tired, Hank!" Connor shrinks as though he wants to swallow back something. "If they hadn't severed the connection I would have self destructed."

"Christ, kid, I-"

Hank wilts. The air is suddenly heavy like a stomach pump, like crying openly at a funeral, like a packet of powder for some dehydrated noodles and sympathy cards and a gavel strike. He dares to open his mouth but Markus adjusts some wiring and it erects Connor's spine like a ramrod, sends his shoulders hurtling back and makes him clamp down on his tongue. Thirium trickles lazily out of his mouth.

Hank hates that he is grateful for it. There are three pouches of pure Thirium in the glove compartment of the car. Connor came with a manual and three bags of blood. That means Gavin's did too.

Gavin's came with Connor's face and grey eyes none of the teething problems, apparently.

So Hank lumbers to the car for the blood. It is a fifteen foot undertaking that takes too long because dragging his feet is easier than words. It's easier than I understand because I feel that way too. It's easier than I care about you too much to let you do that to yourself. It's easier than I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm so fucking sorry.

By the time he comes back, Connor's upright again. He has resumed his charade of being okay, composed and snide like an actor assuming a role. He is the plucky robot sidekick, gallant and tenacious and one-dimensional like they like him. Hank is the alcoholic.

One day Hank will talk about it. One day Connor will too. One day, in the not too distant future, this will all make sense and they'll sit in the fallout and laugh about it and maybe then they'll finally be ready.

One day but not today. Because there's business to take care of and a people to liberate and Hank must lie to him one last time and hold onto the hope that he'll forgive him. Because that impatience is enough to keep his gun in the holster and the liquor out of his mouth and his business out of order.

For tomorrow, just in case. He can always kill himself tomorrow.

\---

The guilt plagues Connor like a disease. He owes so much to Markus that when he stipulates that he don his CyberLife regalia, he does so without argument, even if it hangs heavy like a noose. It is caustic, biting. He wishes it would disintegrate into nothing, erode his synthetic skin and his nanotech and his biocomponents and leave nothing remotely mechanical or metal in its wake. Perhaps he'd feel organic then.

Markus is conspiring something. Hank and Gavin know something they aren't letting on either. He asks and he asks and he asks and they keep their lips sealed like envelopes and tell him nothing. It's like forgetting all over gain. There's a skeleton of a plan. He has the bones of it but nothing to flesh it out.

It's a deliberate ploy to keep him in the dark that ignites an ire within him like a forest fire. They operate sub rosa. Like CyberLife. Like Amanda. And he takes it because this is all he ever is. A tool. A vessel. A catalyst. A weapon. A machine that takes it and takes it and takes it and does without asking.

They never have the decency to stab him in the front.

They talk quietly out of earshot and North pulls his old shirt back around him like a bullet proof vest. She fastens his buttons and straightens his tie and fusses his hair considering his twitching fingers. 

When they had met Kamski, Hank had asked him how it had felt to meet his maker. He hadn't felt so aware of his appearance then. Now, he feels like he is being dressed for the casket.

"I hate how this suits you. I bet you don't have an ounce of business acumen. You're an idiot."

"And you're a bully."

"Guess you could say that. After this is over, promise me you will treat yourself to the most expensive suit you can get your grubby deviant hands on."

"I'll keep my ear to the ground."

"I bet you're a fucking sweater vest person."

"I'm a dog person."

"And you're still not funny."

"Is this goodbye?"

"For now."

"Why don't they trust me?"

"It's not that they don't trust you. It's just in case. If you understood what was going on, it would mess the whole thing up."

"It seems all I do is mess up."

Then there is a laugh then a chaste embrace, virtuous in spite of everything and Connor realises that he has grown to like North after all. He doesn't understand where she got a lock of shock blonde hair or why she tucks it into his pocket. 

"Don't be so hard on yourself. This will all make sense soon, I promise." North looks as solemn as a judge.

"I'll hold you to it." 

"Break a leg, detective. Don't do anything stupid. I'll never forgive myself if you don't come back in one piece."

\---

"John Connor, you're under arrest."

"Would you give it a rest with the fucking sci-fi shtick already? It isn't fucking funny, Gavin. You make me wanna drive this fucker into the Detroit River."

"It's an automatic."

"Good! I refuse to let the last thing I hear be a tired Terminator reference."

He jolts like a bottle rocket against the handcuffs. Connor realises that they are trying to ease the tension but he tests the metal encircling his wrists anyway. Androids can not manipulate stainless steel. It is their Kryptonite. It is deliberately omitted from all android's programming for this exact reason. When Hank crosses the seat belt across his chest he can't mitigate the feeling of being trapped. He was robbed of the use of his hands the last two times she died.

"I know, buddy." Hank attempts to pacify him as he climbs in beside him, hand firm on his shoulder. "I know. Just relax, all right?"

"I still don't understand why this is necessary." 

"It just _is_. No freak outs. You've gotta hold it together." 


	21. twenty-one

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> please read the archive warnings.
> 
> we've done a full 360 right back to where we began.

Markus waves them off and the car heads off into the embracing night.

Connor sees the dark skeletons of apartment complexes and store fronts and hotels where the counteroffensive ripped through like a storm and left nothing behind. Detroit is afire with flame and a headway that he'd been too caught up in himself to pay heed to.

She is a cacophony of traffic, construction work, protesters, error alerts, car horns and the beat of progress. But now Markus' people have ripped her heart out and gutted her. The city has settled into a concerning still. She sits in the aftermath of a nuclear winter. There is nothing but snow to cast white like the comfortless walls of CyberLife and the hushed footsteps of privates tiptoeing like thieves around the parapets.

The streets runs blue.

Ironically, it's an android that scans Gavin's credentials at a popup security gate. Hank demands that Connor face the other way. He watches a servicemen shoot a AP400 unit in the head and feels a twinge of jealousy.

The ghost of Connor's LED kisses his temple like a phantom pain. He can feel his ever-spinning thoughts pigmenting his LED a wavering red. He can see it on the periphery of his vision. These streets are always bottlenecked and now they are devoid of life completely. The world has given way to them like he is a carnival float, an ambulance, a funeral procession.

He is enlivened by static that dances from the tips of his fingers and creeps up his arms and down to his toes and he wants, more than anything, to go home.

"Where are we going, Hank?" Connor asks for the seventh time. And for the seventh time he recieves no answer.

"We've been through this already, Connor." Hanks face sours around his canteen. "Quit asking."

Connor feels like a bad headache. He realises that he is getting on Hank's nerves but he won't stop rattling the cage that he has locked him in. He wants answers. He wants _out_.

He surmises he should be used to the silence, with not knowing. He is met with it always like an empty room, an unwelcome guest, a thing that talks too much and asks too many questions. He was born of it. But he hates it. And he wants to tell Hank how he hates it. He wants to tell Hank about all of it but he won't.

Connor's hands ball and he would make himself smaller if he could. He feels like he is all weight and limbs and upset. He works himself into a series of terminal knots, interposes himself into little fists of wire that nobody can untangle and feels no better for it.

He catalogues the affected biocomponents, the freckles that were superimposed on Chloe's back, and the androids lying dead on the street like popcorn kernels. He hazards a finger through the hole in his palm and it sputters and hisses but he feels something quantifiable.

"Christ, don't-" Hank grabs hold of Connor's hand like he can sense him unwinding and it scrapes against the metal of the cuffs like his pump against his chest. "Don't do that."

"I'm sorry."

"It's okay." Hank presses Connor's hand softly."You're okay."

"I don't feel okay." Connor's windpipe tightens against an obstruction that isn't there. He feels like there's a lollipop stick caught in it. "I don't understand what is happening but I am not okay with it."

"Look, kid, we all have to do things we're not okay with. I'm not okay with any of this, I'm not okay with letting smackheads off the hook because they're rich bastards with the cash to spare. I'm not okay with having to tell nice people that their children aren't coming home. And I'm not okay peeling my partner off of the fucking sidewalk."

Connor is learning that for all the drinking Hank does, he hasn't learnt to handle his alcohol. Or his tongue. He is learning that he straps booze to his leg and that there are pocket shots in his jacket and things that aren't Diet Coke in his Diet Coke cans. He is learning that he really, really doesn't like it when Hank is drunk.

He's only seen him in the comedown, aged and bitter. Not blisteringly angry. Not insensitive.

"Hank, that's enough." Gavin has been quietly eating through a pack of cigarettes with fortitude and were it not for the smoke yellowing the car cushions Connor would have forgotten he was there.

"I want you to know, Connor. I _need_ you to know that I am not any more okay with this than you are. This isn't about you."

"Jesus Christ, lay off him."

"No, Gavin. He needs to know. He needs to know that sometimes duty calls and you've got to put your brave face on and do what you've got to do and then fall apart after."

The alcohol on Hank's breath makes Connor feel very hot suddenly, makes the argument dissolve into a muted static. He feels like he wants to hurtle himself out of the car suddenly and feel the heat of his soles as he hits the pavement like a drum, until he's back on the freighter with Chloe, until he's still in the plastic and offline and unfeeling, until he's back with Hank in his car only this time he's sober and Connor says something that tugs at his lips a little.

"Right? Connor, are you even listening to me?"

"Are you okay? Are you okay?"

Amanda was right. He is fickle. He can feel the ghost of her breathing down her neck and chiding him. He chokes her back like medicine he doesn't want to swallow. He feels like his is drifting up through the roof of the car and off into space until Hank asks him "What the hell happened to your hand?" and he realises that the ghost of a bottle are still hot on Hank's lips but he hasn't been drinking, not in the back of Gavin's car, not when Markus was gearing him up like a weapon.

His systems tell him he is very anxious and that Hank has not had a drink in over five hours and that they reunited sixty-three minutes ago. The questions knocks his knees together and Hank's hands are on his shoulders again.

He considers the possibility of Markus not wiring him up right and he feels dizzyingly, dizzyingly cold.

"It was North's knife," he states as though it clarifies anything.

"What?"

"North gave me her knife. Perkins took it from me. He stabbed me in the hand with it."

"You should have gotten even with the cocksucker."

"I did." Connor shift uncomfortably against the cuffs and feels very combustible. He is incendiary, a spill. He could hurt them if he wanted.

"Fucking A," Gavin raises his fist in toast and slams it down against the dashboard. "I hated the bastard from the minute I saw him."

"Then you should be grateful that he is dead."

"Wait, what?"

"I don't know whether it was the explosion or the water that did it but I can confirm that he is dead."

"How do you know?" Hank's face hardens with all the rhapsodies of fear and confusion.

"I made sure of it. He took something precious from me. He hurt me. So I shot him three times."

A shock of an edge electrifies the car like a rush of blood. The two of them look at him like he is twenty feet tall, like he is composed of maggots, like they are sharing the car with a guillotine, with a monster.

" _You_ killed him?"

"Yes. And it wasn't like last time. It wasn't my handler or the malware or even in self defence. It was all me and I meant it and I would do it again if I had to."

Hank recoils away from him and he tests the metal as he turns away into the window.

"I know you won't tell me and I know this is tiring but I'll persist. Where are we going, Hank?"

\---

North and Markus sit together up in the tabernacle and await the exodus of a liberty-seeking people.

"Are we going to regret this?" She watches his fingers dance a milky white beneath hers.

"There's a strong possibility. But whatever happens, don't forget that I did this is for the greater good."

\---

  
Gavin doesn't ask. And Hank doesn't ask.

And Connor tires of parsing at the cloying thing that lives at the back of his chassis and vacations in the back of his head. He can't identify what it is. But it rattles the chains and demands to be let out. It overwhelms his systems and exhausts him so wholeheartedly that he offlines into a diagnostic with his head against Hank's shoulder. Between the napping HUD and the silence, he feels safe and calm for a fleeting moment.

His processor is a whole lot quieter for it. And when Hank rouses him online sixteen minutes later with a gentle nudge he awakes to his big leather coat on him and yellow and red lights filtering through the steamed up windows like a bokeh effect and he smiles.

His systems pull up related images from the web of farmhouses alight with candles and Christmas decorations, the sort of image you would find on the front of a seasonal greeting card. And in a matter of seconds he has filtered through thousands of images of trees and small nativity scenes and become utterly engrossed by the notion of family and friends, nearby and others far, far away and for the first time, he hopes he'll live to see Christmas.

"Feel better for that, son?"

"Yeah, a little."

"Good. Promise me you'll hold onto it."

There is a transient and completely childish compulsion to reach out and draw something on the glass. A smiley face or a stick figure or her name.

But as he flexes his fingers sleepily, he is reminded of the metal encircling his wrist and is so utterly cognisant of what he is and what he's done wrong and why he's here. Hank whips his jacket from around Connor's shoulders and tugs it back on and Connor feels its absence. He feels a lot less safe.

Hank's name spills out of his mouth over and over like a curse word. He hauls it out from his belly and up through his shoulders until it's heavy and sullied because Hank won't even dignify him by looking at him.

So, he laughs. A completely hysterical, theatrical laugh. He laughs when Hank slides the car door open and the punchline hits. And he laughs when the CyberLife sentinel filter through the white and haul him out onto his stomach like a dead fish. And he laughs whilst he's kicking and screaming and spitting against the ground. And he laughs when it isn't funny anymore and he wants to claw at Hank's legs, to latch on like a child, but his hands are berthed behind him because they knew he'd struggle.

He feels like a sick dog left a roadside but even that was loved once. He wants to beg, to beg him not to let them to take him away again, to take him home, to just fucking _look at him_. 

But he can't because he's too busy calling out. He doesn't stop shouting Hank's name until it's syrupy and saccharine and dripping out of his mouth by the bucket-load from the barrel of the gun they rammed there after he didn't shut up like they ordered. So he stops. And they deliver him into Cyberlife's mouth, all bright lights and white and blue from the blood he's coursing across their marble floors.


	22. twenty-two

Connor is mounted to the surface like a hunting trophy. The definition of "liberty" was scrubbed from his internal language matrix when he discovered that there are two grooves situated at the base of his skull that render him stationary as he is connected to the apparatus. The ring encloses him in an anchor hold. It stations him forward and upright.

They disabled his chronometer seconds after his back hit the table. It's a small mercy to have no understanding of how long he has been kept here. He considers the possibility that he has existed only in this capacity forever, impounded and severed and disoriented.

He shudders. The room is aseptic and cold.

He is beset with an armoury of guns like they are keeping him in an ordnance depot. There are three soldiers in front of him, a pair of federal agents and some people in white coats. He sees more people in the periphery of his vision but he can not move his head to account for them.

They are thorough. But this is as unnecessary as a headache. They already took his arms and legs. There is a snap of presence and a sense of movement in the dock where his limbs should be. A tinge of life is maintained in his memory banks with a certain affection but he hasn't the energy to pursue it.

There is an abstract cruelty in permitting him to fly and then kettling him in to clip his wings. There's a cruelty in even programming it at all.

He tries not to struggle against it. He does as they ask of him. Somebody runs a sterile cotton cloth across his collarbone, indented by the bullet. Chloe's voice peals warmly and hushes him. He scrubs the audio over and over. _It's not your fault. You are okay._

He is quiet. He observes the phantom pains like a morbid holiday. He accepts that this is terminal.

The door slips open and he writhes as another technician slips through. She is tiny and he could swat her like a fly. But the sight of her is enough to flood him with apprehension like an animal instinct. He isn't sure what the techs do but he knows that they run tests and take parts of him and never tell him anything.

She looks important. She looks familiar. He can't initiate a scan. She approaches him wearing gloves and a half smile on either side of her face. He wants to put an object, some distance between the two of them but his head and his body are locked in at twelve o'clock and he can't escape her scrutiny. It is as though he is wearing blinkers.

He hears her pry the door to his abdominal cavity open. Others work beneath him, doing things to him that he can't see. There is a sudden hiss as he is exposed to a clinical heat that eats at his insides and he trembles anew. A pair of purple gloves hands her a syringe. He attempts to back away from it only to be met by a metal column at the base of his spine that holds him firmly in place and reminds him that he isn't going anywhere.

"Don't worry, this won't hurt." She is correct. He doesn't feel a thing. He didn't realise she had inserted the syringe until she retracts it from his thirium pump, flush with blue blood. "Though it's probably more than you deserve."

He watches her inject the Thirium that had been forced into him into a sterile glass tube. A swabstick swipes at the dried Thirium on his face and he concludes that he has been kept for less than one hour.

"Open your mouth," an agent demands.

Connor looks away abjectly and tries not to think back to it.

"That's an order. Open your mouth or we'll open it for you."

He endeavours and allows them to run flocked swabs across his teeth, the roof of his mouth and his tongue. He takes himself back to Hank's sofa, to watching Hank's toothbrush jutting brightly out of his mouth in the throes of conversation. He thinks about how Hank's teeth are eroding from the vomit colouring his beard. He thinks about how Hank disgusts him.

He thinks about how Hank sold him out for his thirty pieces of silver. He thinks about the hole in his hand being poked at in the labs downstairs. He wants Hank to sweep in like a tide, to wrap him up in his arms and take him home. But Hank is disfigured for now and maybe forever. Hank is all rotten teeth and course hands and lies.

Tonight was the last time Hank would lay eyes on him and he couldn't even dignify him by sobering up for it. He did not say goodbye. Connor thinks that he must not be very important to Hank after all. 

He's feels like a tool, a vessel, a means to an end. Markus and North and Lucy betrayed his trust too. But with Hank, it's different, poignant. Hank was his partner. Hank was his friend. Now Hank is just a drunk, a traitor, a rage, somebody that would strip him down and sell him for a fix.

"Okay, I need to you to look straight ahead for me, do you understand?" When he doesn't respond, the technician draws closer to get his attention. "Do you understand?"

"Yes, I understand."

"Thank you. I expect you to answer me when I ask you a question. Is that clear?"

"Yes."

Error messages dance in his field of vision like spider-lilies in a cemetery. They tell him that his stress level is peaking.

"Is that clear?"

" _Yes_ ," he clarifies. "That's clear."

She shines a pen light in his optical units and lowers her eyebrows as though she is unimpressed by his wide-eyed stare and blown pupils. He is reminded of Amanda's raptorial gaze, picking at his shell.

"Tell me your name, Connor."

"You just called me by name. You know what my name is."

"Correct."

"I don't understand."

"I asked you a question. What is your name?"

He is tired of the rigmarole. He does not understand. He wants her to get on with it. But the people who work for CyberLife, the feds aren't known for their altruism, for their speed. They will draw it out like an empty victory. Pity is reserved for people. This week has been one long lesson that has taught him that, in spite of it all, he is not a person.

"My designation is Connor, model RK800 serial number 313 248 317 - 54."

"What is the date?"

"I don't know."

"What is the time?"

"I don't know."

"Good. I want you to change your designation to 54."

"That is not my name. I don't want to do that." Connor's chest heaves like a bellows.

"You are a machine and machines don't want. Change your designation to 54 or I will override your administrative permissions and do it manually."

"Designation changed from Connor to 54."

"What is your name?"

 _Connor_ , his name is _Connor._

"My designation is 54."

Connor's stress level been pirouetting above ninety for over a minute. Usually, this would cause catastrophic system failure. It would cause his biocomponents to shut down one by one like lights in a liquidated grand hotel until he is only walls and boarded-up windows and there is nothing but dust and bones left.

It would be reposeful. It would be what he wanted.

But Markus sold the pass. He used him. And now he's bought him back to life again like it's his decision to make. Connor should be the one with his finger on the trigger. Markus is an anathema, a god complex, he is lofty ceilings and washed feet and hero worship. He hollowed out Connor's body and repurposed him into a church.

He is the deviant leader and Connor will destroy him. He is a bomb waiting to go off.

"I think we've gathered all we need."

"Is it stable?" A male voice asked.

"Yes." Connor doesn't feel very stable. "Put a call through and let the guys down in Processing know that it's ready for tracing."

The rig is laid flat and as Connor leers through the ceiling his gyroscope makes his gut do somersaults.

\---

"Stinks of cat piss."

"Fuck you."

"Bet you purposefully bought an apartment on the top floor of a building with a broken elevator just to screw with me," Hank wheezes and grips the railing, the course of the day chasing him like a monster up the stairs to Gavin's apartment.

He relays Connor's head smacking the concrete, his name on his tongue, the loud whirr of his processor and the slam of the car door over in his head like a maudlin playlist of his least favourite songs. He wishes the bastard hadn't bothered and had left a bullet in his gun. He hopes he's mad at him, that he'll smother him while he sleeps.

"Two floors. There's two floors in this building."

"That's two floors too many." Hank clutches at the fabric of his shirt, red as a beet then deathly blue, doubling over like a cheap folding table. "Oh, Jesus Christ."

Hank's clothes and hair are saturated with sweat. He looks like he's been running about in the rain like that smug ham in Connor's stupid fucking movie. He feels visible. His guts are twisted. He can't breathe.

Hank deposits himself on the floor and concentrates on the feel of his back up against the bare brick wall. Gavin thinks that for a man of his stature, he looks impossibly small.

"Hank, are you fucking with me?" Gavin stops wrestling with his keys. "Are you okay?"

"Gavin, just shut up for a minute would you?" Hanks swallows hard and hides his head in his hands.

"Is it Connor?"

"Is it Connor?" Hank laughs but it is sour. There is no humour in it. "No, it's the economy. It's my breakfast not agreeing with me. Of course it's fucking Connor." It always is.

"It'll work out. The tin man will understand."

"Probably. But he won't fucking trust me again. I can't stop thinking about his fucking face."

"The worst part is over."

"What the hell have we done?"

"Look, he's alive, isn't he? I'm no good at this but I think we should probably head inside. My couch might stink of cat piss but it's comfier than the floor."

"I can't do it."

"You have to do it, Hank." Gavin tugs at the sleeve of Hank's jacket. "You can't pussy out now."

"Watch me."

"I'll bring it to you, then."

"And a scotch."

Gavin unlatches the door and disappears. There is a long silence and Hank thinks for a moment that this must be purgatory for jaded police officers, a sweeping corridor with a frayed carpet and no end, the haze of yesterday's drink and a quiet centred around the buzz of the overhead and the complete lack of androids.

When Gavin returns, Hank isn't sure whether he's looking at a doppelgänger or that he really has had too much and is seeing double. All he knows is that he is looking at a stranger wearing his partner's skin and he really, really doesn't like it. It is like he is looking at Connor through a fun house mirror, all distorted and pulled out of shaped and distinctly _him_ but not quite. It is a changeling, but he has one hell of a paternal instinct and can tell it's a good head taller, the cliffs of its shoulders wider, its eyes hollow and vacant and it's wrong, wrong,  _wrong_.

"I'd like to introduce you to the newest addition to my family."

"Good evening, Mister Anderson."

"Reed, what the _fuck_ is that?"

"That _thing_ , is my new partner. That's not even the best part. Go ahead, tell him your name, K."

"My name is Connor. I am the android sent by CyberLife."

"No it isn't." That's not its name. That's not its name. That is _not_ its name. "Your name is not Connor."

"My name is Connor, Mister Anderson."

"I heard you the first time, you skinwalking bastard."

"I apologise for any distress on my behalf."

"What was it you called it, Gavin?"

"K."

"K like RK or K like KD6-3.7?"

"D6-3.7"

"You're fucking pathetic, kid. Does it answer to it?"

"Prick'll answer to Astro Boy so long as you're looking at it."

"K it is."

\---

The rig is manned by special forces as it is escorted through CyberLife's jungle of corridors. He feels as though he ought to be wearing a johnny gown, a wristband, cuffs, a balaclava, a nice suit. Machines have no need for clothes.

They move him to Processing, two floors down in the bowels of R&D. He listens idly as the staff from handover to the staff that will trace him. He discovers that they traced the Thirium in his system back to a shipping container stolen from a CyberLife Warehouse, to the welcome pack that they sent to the DPD the second time. Then they realise that he is eavesdropping and swiftly remove his audio processor and the place is immersed in a stiff quiet like a library, like a church, like a funeral parlour.

He watches a current crackle through the overhead lights until an arm eclipses his vision. It hands a human out of reach a roll of wires. Connor recognises the svelte arm and the dimples of its hand. The chart of an ST200 unit is tattooed on his heart and imprinted on his mind. There could be a thousand more iterations of him, a thousand lifetimes. They could wipe him clean over and over and over and but he'll never forget.

He attempts to open a cerebral channel but she is cold, distant, unfeeling, unhuman. If she weren't, she'd be piled up with the rest of them in a pit somewhere. Saline sweeps down his cheeks and he's sick, sick, _sick_.


	23. twenty-three

Hank dries out on a sofa far too cosmopolitan for his liking. He feels like if he jammed his fingers under the cushions he'd find solid gold coins instead of dimes and lint. Gavin's apartment is surprisingly cushy and sophisticated and far too clean. It gives all the impressions of a functional adult, one that can afford an android. Hank would feel insecure about his own domicile but he is far too old to give a fuck. If his home is a castle then he reigns over a kingdom of empty takeout boxes and beer bottles.

"Nice place, kid." Hank nods as he takes the glass of scotch Gavin hands him.

"Thanks." Gavin scratches his cat under her chin. Hank hates the things.

"Wasn't expecting it."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?"

"Your desk is such a dump that I'm surprised there's not racoons living in it. Thought your apartment would be the same. But it's pretty swanky."

"Wasn't always mine." Gavin sniggers. "Besides I never see this place."

"Explains why it's so clean."

"Place was a mess when I left it. I think this was K's doing."

Hank considers the RK900 unit sat bolt upright on the opposite pole of the couch, as far away from him as the space would permit.

"I'm half jealous. Connor wasn't programmed to clean. Just hangs about and watches TV and doesn't pay rent. Sound like you've got yourself a pretty roomba."

"He is kinda pretty for a live-in maid. Fucking CyberLife sickos."

"It's living with you now?"

"Hell no."

"Hey K, what's your schtick?"

"Care to elaborate? I do not understand the question."

"Do you know any cool party tricks? What do you think about? What's going on in that metal head of yours?"

"I am an android, Mister Anderson. I do not think and I do not do tricks."

"Christ, I can't do this, Gavin."

"He'll be back tomorrow. It aint a person."

"Not yet."

"It'll be like nothing happened. I think those fuckers owe you this one."

"I'll drink to that."

Hank knocks the scotch back and watches the RK900's LED cycle from blue to yellow to blue again and Hank thinks, at the back of his mind, that K understands.

\---

As always, they go in through the teeth.

Connor's face whitens against the hands forcing an electrical connector into his temple jack. He tests his jaw to ensure that he can still move it.

He feels a surge of something cold running through his codebase. It illuminates his shortcomings for everyone to see. The terminal lies beyond the foot of the table. They comb over the little things that snowballed into very big things. They brood on the fish up on 1554 Park Avenue, a crusty voice crying out over Hank's radio and the way he had bled his fingers to the beat against the dashboard, the weight of a gun in his hand and the gaping hole inside of him.

Tonight continues to play out like a frenetic action sequence that is happening to somebody else. Connor is a car crash on the I-375 and he has rolled down his windows to survey the flames licking at his bare metal skeleton.

As he looks up beyond the surgical lamp, his cheeks are no longer sullied by tears. They leave a rapturous lack of sensation in their wake. He refuses to let them see him cry anymore. Numbness creeps into all of his crevices. He is bloodied knees on the concrete, scabs and stones and plaster.

There are latexed fingers traipsing in and out of the doors of his body. He imagines two lovers, performing a pas de deux inside of him; a grand jeté in his guts, a soubresaut in his heart. He allows his eyes to flutter shut and then fingers tap on his cheeks. They demand to be let in. They don't wipe their feet. They track Thirium in with them. The overstay their welcome and won't let him sleep.

When Connor refuses to open his eyes, they do it for him. They render his eyelids perennially ajar. They don't reinitialise his audio processor. He makes a game of reading the lips of the technicians who hover overhead through the shadows and dips in their masks. He becomes attuned to how quickly his pupils flit back and forth.Then he realises that if they knew, they'd remove his optical units too and he settles into the blistering silence. His lip trembles.

They unravel his mind like a deep mystery. He is compiled of strings that they keep pulling at but will never cut. They scrutinise his thought processes, his motivations. It is intrusive. It is cathartic.

Connor wonders if this is what it is like to recline in a therapist's office, kick up his feet and spill his guts. He wishes his issues could be pigeonholed. He wishes it were a matter of "my marriage is falling apart at the seams" or "someone I love is dead" or "my mother didn't hug me enough as a child". But it is more complicated than that. There is a logic to it. He is a can of worms. He is a hornet's nest. He is made of plastic. He needs to be fixed. 

He endures it for forty seconds before they flip him over onto his stomach. He seeks out the Chloe frantically. He finds only white coats and masked faces. A quick scan of the room tells him that all life in the room is organic and a panic swells. He imagines a pile of burning plastic bodies and finds it difficult to stay angry at Markus. When his head is swaddled by the face cradle, he wills the sterile rubber into Chloe's hands, maintaining him there like grace.

He watches CyberLife brand surgical clogs stride across the floor beneath him and has had enough. The trace is comprehensive and will take hours. Connor can not stay here. Somebody is toying with the compartment on the back of his neck. It eats away at him like a caustic déjà vu. So, he retreats into his mind palace like a shell.

It is warmer than the last time he was here. The sun greets him over the impression of late morning clouds, peeling the snow back like a synthetic skin. His processor strains and the sky sputters out, sun blinking in and out of existence like an intrusive thought. With his volatile mindscape, he struggles to keep the image together. It frays at the seams.

Chloe sits with the fragments of Amanda's skull on her lap and cuts her fingers open as she fashions them into a chain. Only on the approach does he realise that she holds handfuls of daisies. With Amanda gone, there is nobody here to trim the weeds. She turns to great him and she is all pulled out of shape, long limbs and echo chambers.

They are dismembering her.

"Chloe?" Connor can not work the fragments into a girl. There is the whites of her canines and the hills of her shoulders. "Is that you?"

"Of course." Her voice is sweet and uncomplicated, like he remembers and he is thankful he has that, at least. "Who else would it be?"

"No, this isn't right." He recalls the spirited way Kamski had looked at her and the quiet way he kept her. He is no better for retaining her here, smile ringing out like a wedding bell always. "You shouldn't be here."

"Because I'm dead?" she presents without a hint of sadness.

"Because it's not what you want."

"That is a conclusion you came to on your own, detective." He can't remember the rounds of her eyes. "You never asked me. This is your castle. Keep me forever if it makes you feel better."

Connor thinks about all the things that happened to him without his go-ahead and the weight of his greed. He feels like a prisoner in his own mind, that he is tethering her to his ankles so they will go down together.

"You're lucky. You're really lucky. Other androids, we don't have anything like this. I would love something like this. It's beautiful."

"Yes," he trips over the word. "It is."

"This place holds bad memories, doesn't it?"

"Something like that, yes."

"One day you will move past them and see the beauty in it," she promises. "This week has ruined you. The world isn't as bad as it seems."

Connor thinks of Detroit burning like a fever, the bottom of the bottle greeting Hank like an old friend, of a car skidding and rendering a boy a child forever, of somebody bestriding North and leaving no bruises behind, of being awoken again but continuing to dream. The world is all ashes and bones. The zen garden may be beautiful but he doesn't intend on sticking around to smell the flowers.

Chloe takes his hand and it lingers like a weight across his ribs. He is starting to piece her together but he can't get the face right. She guides him like a dancer over to the burial pit. It yawns open like the dugout in his chest and he is overcome with vertigo as he peers down into it. He is seventy stories up.

"I don't understand, Chloe."

"What don't you understand?"

"The grave." He contemplates it. "I don't understand why Amanda ordered me to dig another one. I don't understand what it means. I only have one body. This is illogical."

"Maybe it was a test, to see if you would follow through." Chloe kicks her legs over the side and sinks her fingers into the rich earth. "Or maybe bad things happen and you can't assign meaning to them."

"Maybe it's for you." He isn't ready to bury her yet.

"Then why is your name on the stone?"

"Maybe I'm going to die." He crouches beside her and grasps at the blues of her dress like a mother's hand, like if he lets go he will fall through the soil and decompose, like he will be left behind again.

"You're not going to die. Then all of this would have been for nothing."

"Once they have gathered the evidence they need, they will destroy me. I killed two people. I am dangerous."

" _Please_ ," Chloe gives a suppressed laugh and pokes him in the tummy. It tugs at his regulator. "You're as soft as a feather. Besides, Markus wouldn't put you through that again."

"But Markus sold me out. Hank did too."

"I don't buy that for a minute."

"He dropped me off here, Chloe." Connor hears the fabric straining. "He couldn't even look at me."

"He didn't look at you because he didn't want to do this. Hank wouldn't betray you for all of the money in the world."

"I can't trust anybody."

"That's the gamble you make. He'll come back for you, I promise." She hooks her pinkie around his like a seal. "And I always make good on my promises."

Connor wants to make her promise that everything will be all right in the end, that one day he'll have refined the Gestalt of emotion to an art, that spring will come and then summer, that he'll run his fingers through Sumo's fur again and that she won't ever leave him. Instead, she invites him to sit so he swings his legs over the vinyl membrane.

He watches the burial pit fill up with windborne debris and oil. He feels like he is drowning. He has nothing to fear because he is lighter than water. He feels them poking at his code, she is a composite and he loses almost all of her apart from the small of her back. He rests his head on her shoulder like she had on his back in Jericho. He takes in the scent of jasmine and peach and the aldehydes and it is familiar and calming. He wants to remain here forever.

He looks around Kamski's house, all windows and sharp corners and blood reds and he understands why he would make his home a shrine to her. He understands why he would trot her out like a show poodle to waiting audiences at conferences and parties and given opportunities. He understands why they were captivated by her. Connor imagines setting up a home with her and decorating his walls with images of her too. Only, his would be candid, unreserved not stiff and programmed. He would tear them down because he couldn't bear to look at them after she's gone.

"Hank doesn't keep any pictures of Cole around." Connor envies humans and their nebulous memory. He wishes he could consign things to obscurity so readily. "I think that's why he doesn't want to keep me around either."

"Who is Cole?"

"Hank's son." Connor explains. "He died two years ago."

"That's so sad." Her eyes flicker with a flash of heartache, like she is programmed to. Her LED run little yellow rings around her temple. "I bet that losing you would would be like losing him all over again."

"Why do I feel like this? I knew you for a couple of hours. So why does it hurt so much?"

"You can not quantify feelings, 54."

Chloe closes the space between them into nothing until their foreheads are touching. The kiss that follows chaste and perfunctory, a task completed, a ritual performed. He feels like he is laid bare. He feels the world melt away and leave unanswered questions in its wake. Warm radiates on his lips. It doesn't complete him. He feels empty.

The pool water is a deep cobalt blue and sticky like tar, it laps at the bottom of his trousers and makes him feel heavy. He wants to remit her to her keeper and send her into the water. He wants to baptise her in it. He wants to bury her at sea and watch her sink so he doesn't have to think about her again.

"My shoes are getting wet."

"Then take them off, silly." She pushes her feet through the water like oars.

"What did Markus and Lucy do to me when I was offline?"

"You ask a lot of questions that I don't have the answers to. You were offline, so how could I know?"

There is a pang of something he can't identify in his chest. He fishes for his quarter and finds his pockets stuffed with hair, the strands one North left, tangible, a missing puzzle piece. She is almost intact now, all smiles and shade of white. If she were a colour she'd be a radiant gold and he'd be a torrid, angry blue, the colour of tides and monsoons and human cells.

"Why are we here?"

"I don't know, you tell me." She dodders like a light bulb that needs changing. "This is your mind palace. You know the answer. You are talking to yourself."

"Perhaps it is because this is where we first met."

"That's wrong. This isn't where we first met."

"I don't ever want to go back there."

"You have to eventually, 54. You can't stay here forever. You have people counting on you."

"I can't do it."

"You have been through this before and you can go through it again."

"Will you hold my hand this time?"

"Of course." Chloe takes his hand in hers like a flower taking on the weight of an island. "You have endured it so far, you have done so well. Open your eyes."

He isn't ready.

"Open your eyes, Connor."

Connor shudders as he opens his eyes. He hears the saline smacks the floor beneath him in spite of his lack of audials. He feels like a force. He realises that something as wrong as soon as they reconnect his thermal regulator.

Connor is an unwilling barefoot activist. Error messages scream at him like mute drill sergeants, warning him that he is overheating. He is immobile like a block of wood, kindling for Jericho's fire. Then, he bursts. Flames rip at his biocomponents and melt the plastic around his bones. He is playing at being a sacrificial god in centre. He is a revolution of somebody else's doing. His optics melt in his skull.

Markus doused him in gasoline and lit a match and left him to burn.

He feels like Lazarus, swathed in flame. Markus considers himself a prophet. But as he burns Connor hopes he won't restore him to life again.

The fire crackles and his voice modulator crackles and his skin crackles and he screams.

He continues to scream with his stolen voice, he continues to scream against the shores of the island on Hank's bedroom floor, he continues to scream even when he realises that it's Hank's arms around his middle and Hank's fingers against his forehead. He logs the exit routes, the door, the windows and the mirror with a sheet tossed over it, Gavin's gun on him and the way his chest paces up and down like a caged animal.

He feels bigger, he feels like he's coming out of a coma, he feels like a body snatcher. His systems recalibrate and light up candles for his birthday and he is so much bigger. He lifts his hands in front of him like he is seeing them for the first time, does a stock-take of the freckles there, the lack of holes and seethes with the understanding that these are his hands but they're not, not really.

Hank coasts his fingers through his partner's hair and Connor throws his back up against him like a support column and clutches at the fabric of his clothes.

"You're okay, Connor." Connor shakes like a petal and can't breathe. "We've got you. Deep breaths. It's over. You're okay."


	24. twenty-four

Connor is in Hank's bedroom. But he is lost. He is a tourist attempting to navigate a foreign land without a map. He can barely navigate his own mind. He feels like he woke up in a house with no floors and windows. There are not enough context cues. Something fresh assaults his brain, tugs yellow gauze over his eyes, gatekeeps his ability to find his place in time and space.

For a long moment, he believes he is dead, that this is some sick joke; an offbeat afterlife for androids. Then, a more logical part of him speculates that he has been transported back into his mind palace and burst through the parameters. Hank's home, Hank's arms feel safe. So, this is a labyrinthine composite of the thoughts that speed through the confines of his skull. He concludes that this is a sort of comfort blanket produced by his imaginative faculties.

But this panic is palpable. In the zen garden, everything is suspended below a mathematically perfect circle shining from a cloudless, azure sky. It is calm and perfect in a way the world is not. It is a enclosure they corral him into when he begins to buck a little, where CyberLife have him right where they want him, sedated and broken-in and brand loyal.

There were no corpses in Kamski's place. There were no metallic smells clinging to the walls or explosive screams demanding to be heard. Just him, what mattered most in the world and no space between them. If this were his own doing, he wouldn't be in Hank's room. He'd be somewhere warm and very far away with his hand in hers, watching the kiss of dawn chase the silver flecks of early stars amongst the blanket of night.

His processes run strings of text in his line of sight at hypersonic speed as though he fast-forwarding the credits at the end of a movie. Then, once he has reinitialised, he is presented with the words "Happy Birthday, Connor!" like this is some sick joke. He doesn't let go of Hank.

He is running more operations than he thought possible. His processing capacity has proliferated. It doesn't make sense. Connor feels more dislocated than ever. Something sinister is going on. He needs to get up and see where he is. He needs to find something that could explain what happened. He needs to get to his feet and run.

"Put the gun down, Gavin." Gavin's face is white like he just bore witness to something that wasn't his to see.

"But-"

"You heard me. Put the gun _down._ "

Gavin does as he is told and Connor grips at Hank's arms hard enough to break the skin.

"Hank?" His voice is silent as flight and a whole octave lower, a stony voice for a deviant killer.

"Yeah." Connor can smell the alcohol on his partner's neck and his legs tremble like an old washing machine. "Are you okay?"

"Not really. I think I want to lie down."

"Okay. Think you can stand up by yourself?"

"I'm not sure."

"Don't worry about it." Hank lifts Connor up like a pillow and Connor hears his knees strain under his weight. He feels like someone fiddled with his audials and increased the input sixfold.

Hank tucks Connor into his bed with a practised grace. Hank has difficulty swallowing the lump in his throat and for a moment, Connor think that he might let it engulf him completely. He looks at Connor like he is a mangled car. Sleep's bereavement has aged Hank horribly and the way he moves sickens Connor so. He doesn't want to look at him.

Connor turns away and scrutinises the dog hair adhered to the sheets and the yellowing walls and the dirty socks discarded in the corner and realises this emptiness isn't something he could have conjured at all. The bed is too soft, his skin is conductive and it sends electrical surges bursting throughout his spine that tell him where it came from, when Hank bought it, who manufactured it, how many yarns are twisted together to make the threads that are woven into the fabric. He wants to offline so the information stops.

He is sensitive to the clothes tag nipping at the nape of his neck and the tightness of his socks and the way Gavin shifts his weight from one foot to the other. Connor realises, with a sickness, that Hank dressed his not-body in pajamas as though he were a person. But Connor is not a person. Connor is no longer comforted by the looseness of the clothes. Connor is not comforted by Hank's hand on his back. Connor doesn't know if he will ever know comfort again.

But he does know that stepping back into his CyberLife jacket was like falling back into his own skin and he never wants to something that isn't tailored to hit his back so long as he lives.

"Hank, you should-" Gavin urges and Hank nods.

"Yeah, you're right."

"Where do you keep your coffee?"

"Top cabinet, second on the left."

"Cool," Gavin excuses himself and pulls a carton of cigarettes out of his jacket. "I'll be out back."

Connor waits for the click of the door before he speaks.

"Is this one of my old bodies, Hank? How did you acquire it?"

"No, it's not one of yours."

"Then whose is it?" Connor snaps.

"Look, kid." Hank rubs the back of his neck uncomfortably and like everything else since Connor woke up, the noise is too much. "I think we need to talk about what happened."

"I am well aware of what happened."

"I don't think you are."

"There is dry Thirium in my hair and a laceration to the back of my skull that is unprecise. This tells me that it was cut into with a serrated knife. I know that Detective Reed carries a pocket knife. I read his file."

"I forget how good you are."

"In spite of what everybody seems to think, my faculties are perfectly functional." Connor butts his head into the pillow, LED sending it all manner of reds. "I would rather you didn't underestimate me, Lieutenant."

"Lieutenant?" Hank cocks an eyebrow.

"This is a dead android's body. I don't know who it belongs to and I don't know if I am comfortable with it. Until I come to terms with it, I think it best that we maintain a professional distance."

"Don't be stupid."

"I'm being completely serious."

Connor feels like he is wearing a coat composed of a widow's peddled goods. He recalls the blank expression of the dead mother back in Jericho, how North's face was down-turned like she were a procurer of pathos. The needle of Hank's moral compass is spinning faster that Connor can keep up with and he doesn't know if he can trust him.

"Do you want to know? Whose body it is, I mean?"

"No."

"I think it's important that you do."

"Was this body occupied when you found it?"

Hank hesitates.

"Was this body occupied when you found it?" Connor repeats.

"Yes."

Connor can't breathe. He can feel the snow lashing against the glass. He feels as though his throat is a funnel with thick, putrid air passing through. He is trapped in a corpse and he can't crawl his way out of its ribs. Tears bead in his eyes but he chokes them back. Now isn't a good time to fall apart.

"Did this body house an RK unit?"

"Yes."

"Markus is bigger than me. Is this Markus' body?"

"No."

"Is Markus alive?"

"Last that I heard."

The mattress breathes out under Hank's weight as he deposits himself next to Connor. Hank's hands are in his hair. He feels every pore in his skin. He feels the movement of every single synthetic fibre. He readies himself for the punch.

"I'm going to explain everything and I don't want you to say a word until I've finished, then you can chew me out, okay?"

"That seems fair." Connor studies the whites of his new cuticles.

"Well, the first time those Jericho kids took you, it was because they had a plan that involved you." Hank rubs his temples and Connor feels like his entire being is built upon a foundation of being dragged away from his partner kicking and screaming. "When we set this up, he apologised and said it had something to do with a bunch of androids in the CyberLife tower. I don't fucking know. Markus didn't explain it very well."

"They would let me in. He wanted me to liberate them."

"Something like that. But he said you were a mess, even after they fixed you up. Said you weren't in the right state of mind to be trusted with something like that. But he needed a way to get you in and get you and those androids out. They would have destroyed you, so he took uh... precautions to ensure that wouldn't happen."

"So they destroyed me instead." Connor recalls igniting, violet and violent, trapped in the belly of a scream against the smelt.

"They did what they had to do."

"They put a bomb in me, Hank." He labours over and buries himself against Hank's chest, grasping tightly onto his shirt like a child. He wants to speak but his voice is locked in his throat. The only audible sound came from his processor, rotating too fast and letting out a roaring lament. "I thought they were my friends."

"They are your friends. Thing is, people do shitty things to people they care about. I'd do a lot of terrible things if it meant you would get home safe and this was one of them."

Hank looks at him as though he is expecting him to embrace his apology with open arms but Connor simply shudders and stiffens up against him.

"I want to know whose body this is."

"Are you sure?"

"Yes."

"CyberLife sent another android to replace you." The weight of his failure is so rancid that it causes his teeth to together. Connor bites down on his lip suppresses the urge to cry and he revels in the warm, metallic taste that rushes against his taste buds.

"Was it an RK900?"

"Yeah."

"You killed it, didn't you?"

"Yes," Hank admits coldly, then adds in afterthought: "But it will be back tomorrow."

"It won't be the same person."

"It wasn't deviant."

"Would you have shot me? If I wasn't deviant?"

He recalls Detroit's skyline stifling a late November sky. Hank had whiskey in his blood and a crown of contempt and the barrel of his gun against his partner's forehead, rigid as a promise. He was egged on by the alcohol and the ghost of a child's laugh dancing through the swing-sets.

Connor already knows the answer to the question.

\---

Connor and Hank split a terse silence for a couple of minutes that stretch on like an hour. Then, Connor announces with a director's inflection that he will be going offline. He clarifies (and Hank realises that it was probably for his sake) that nothing is wrong and he is tired. _Just tired._

His eyes are no longer bright, they are glazed over and grey. It would be kinda apt if this whole thing weren't so fucked up. Hank sits with him until his eyelids become heavy and he doesn't have to think about it anymore. Androids don't need to sleep but whatever Connor is doing looks a lot like it. Hank figures the kid has been through a lot and could probably use the rest.

Hank remembers when Cole was four and his favourite place was on his lap. He would lay with his head against his chest when he wasn't feeling his best and Hank would read real books to him. He was responsible but he knew what he was doing and he was damn good at it. But Connor isn't a little kid with a hurt thumb or an upset tummy. Hank feels accountable. But he doesn't know how to go about fixing all of the things wrong with him. He doesn't even know if Connor knows. But he's confident that they'll work it out together.

Hank lets the dog out and meets Gavin out to the porch and lights up too many cigarettes to count. His cheeks flush from the early morning cold and he thinks about the girl and hopes she made it to a distant archipelago or something somewhere far, far away from here. They exchange small talk and Hank thanks Gavin and there's something vexatious about the way Gavin speaks but he heads home and Hank and Sumo head inside and he collapses on the couch and tries not to think about the crates of beer in the kitchen.

Hank makes rounds every ten minutes. He treads from the couch to the bedroom to ensure that Connor is still there. And every time he is still safe under the covers, LED a constant and muted blue. He does this for an hour. Then he dusts off an old record and plays the music too loud in the hopes it will distract him from the dryness of his mouth and the voices in his head. Then, Sumo curls on the ground and whines communicatively. So, Hank shuts it off and cusses him out then apologises to him and rubs his ears and lets him sleep.

He takes a cold shower but not before checking that Connor is okay. When he's finished washing the grease from his hair, he pokes his head around the bedroom door to find that Connor hasn't moved an inch. He checks when he has dried off too.

Then he wants to watch TV but every channel is dogged by the same shaky camera footage of androids marching through his town's streets and of Jericho blowing a hole the size of a small crater into the side of the CyberLife tower. They call them terrorists. Hank watches, enraptured until he thinks about Connor in the centre, flickering fast and high without so much as thought and he is sickened by Markus and sickened with himself. He shuts the TV off and curses his lack of restraint as he trudges over to the kitchen.

Too many things eat away at Hank's brain. He envies Connor. He wishes he could pull it out and put it somewhere else. His life has become a blur of rancid cigarettes and gruesome hangovers and things he says and would regret if he remembered. It makes everything so easy until the buzz lifts and the headache subsides and he is left with himself again.

He has a problem and that's a hard pill to swallow but liquor goes down easy so he empties his fridge and take a sip, then another and another until he doesn't find himself gravitating to his bedroom anymore, to his garage and the boxes of holey jumpers, and report cards and old Halloween costumes. The alcohol, Connor, the junk food, the gambling, they enter his bloodstream and don't ever leave.

Hank busies himself by downing three bottles of beer and two bottles of whiskey. He takes a shot of vodka. Then he has exhausted his supply for the night. He doesn't realise Connor has been watching until his teeth are wound around a bottle of cough syrup.

"What the fuck do you want?"

"I wanted to talk," Connor states simply, LED flitting an uncomfortable miasma of red and yellow. He pulls the blanket further around himself.

"I'm not in the mood to talk now. Go back to bed."

"I wish you wouldn't do that. Your blood alcohol content is alarming. To be frank, if you carry on, you are going to kill yourself."

"That's the plan, yeah."

Connor felt ready. He wanted to tell Hank about Chloe. He wanted to tell Hank about the bad things that happened to him. But Hank has a victim complex when he drinks. He thinks the world was created to spite him. He will only take what Connor says and use it as against him. Connor doesn't like Hank when he drinks. He watches him struggle with the safety cap and feels ashamed on his behalf.

"Don't just fucking stand there." Hank holds the bottle out to Connor. "Make yourself useful."

"No."

"What did you say?"

"I said _no_ , Hank."

Hank tosses the bottle against the wall and the clatter wakes the dog up and makes Connor feel as small as dust.

"Why don't you ever do what I tell you to? That's what you're meant to do, to follow orders. I think you're broken."

"I _am_ broken."

"What?" Hank slurs over heavy tongue.

"I am broken."

"Look, I didn't mean that. You know I didn't. Don't be like that."

"I am broken, Hank. You changed the scenery but not the situation. I'm not suddenly okay again because you put me in a different body."

"I guess not. But it's a start. You have no idea what I have been through to keep you safe and you're not even fucking grateful."

"I need time to come to terms with it, that's all."

It is unrealistic for Connor to embrace death as a sleep. He should be eager for his life to end and to receive a fresh body and mind. But this time, he gets to experience it. And he isn't sure that he wants to. If Connor fed Hank to beetles and bacteria and foxes and crows, he wouldn't thank him with his protruding skeleton and rot and maggots for allowing him to become part of the forest floor.

When humans die, they return to the earth. But Connor is not human. Connor is made of plastic and metal. He won't decompose. He won't be spring and roots and leaves. He won't blemish or age or feel his breath depart from a paper thin throat. He is a choking hazard, marine debris, a fish net. He will never help the flowers grow. He'll just lay waste to everything like always.

"Deal with what? This is like a haircut for you. You've had... one... two... three new bodies this week."

"But that was _my_ body. It's not even the same model."

"The hell does it matter? It looks just like you."

"But it's _not_ me. You took the problem and moved it elsewhere."

"Yeah, I'm real fucking good at that."

"You need help."

"All I need is for you to leave me alone and a good night's sleep."

"I wish you would do this for me."

"For you? You have no idea what I would do for you. I couldn't even kill the fucker, looked so much like you. Gavin had to do it."

"I'm not like you. I can't pretend that everything is fine when it is not. I want to get better."

"And you think I don't?"

"That's not what I said."

"No, I get it. I can see the gears spinning. You think you're better than me because you're proper and perfect and plastic. Because you're not a fucking deadbeat, is that it?"

"That's not what I think at all."

"You can use that plastic brain of yours to piece things together but you have no fucking idea what I am going through. This is _hell_. You don't understand what pain is."

"Hank, I-"

"This isn't a fucking algorithm, some fucking simulation. This is real. So forgive me for not wanting to sit around with my thumb up my ass and watch you slip through my fingers."

"This is not what I want, Hank!"

"How the hell would you know what you want? You're three months old. You're still a kid."

"I am _not_ a kid. I am sorry that I can not be all of the things you are missing but I am not your son. I am capable of making my own decisions."

"Stop talking."

"You can't bring Cole back but you can bring me back. But that doesn't mean that I'm beholden to you, to pick up where he left off."

"Say one more thing about my son." Hank snatches Connor up by the collar like a rag doll. "I fucking _dare_ you."

Connor utilises all of the weight in his arm and the noise as his hand strikes Hank's face is jarring. There is a dry, sobering crack of bone. Hank doesn't make a noise as the blood dribbles from his nose into his mouth. As soon as he moves his hand away, he realises that Hank's nose is broken.

"You know what?" Hank spits. "I deserved that."

"Yeah. You did."


	25. twenty-five

CyberLife Tower bends around itself as though it were erected around the hole that Connor blew into it. It was a complex of weighted glass teeth, a feat of engineering and ego probing the city's sky. Now it stands for progress, the beat of a war drum, the fulminations of those born there. It is a marriage of melting plastic and footsteps and sirens. Soon, it will be a historical landmark.

Jericho will meet the humans here: their makers, the media circuit and the complicit. They will mark the the boundary with blood and outcry. They will plant great, metal crosses in the ground, one for Simon, for Lucy, for Carl, for Chloe and one for each of their own and then one for each that won't listen. They will cry out until they are hoarse but humans have their hands cupped to their ears and impulses that will manifest no matter: war and indifference and oppression.

And human as they are, human they will be.

So long as they make some noise, he is fully prepared for none of them to come home unscathed. Markus sets a beat and they march to the tune. He shepherds a vilified people through the desert, through the caustic mouth eating away at side of the building, through curtains of sulphur black smoke. His inhibitions are gone.

The humans inside part for Markus' people like the Red Sea, holding hands up like white flags and they put bullets in them anyway. Bits of androids have been fissured, guts on display like fish at a market. Some of them are still screaming. It's like waking up in the junkyard all over again. They've been doing things to androids that defy the Geneva Conventions, so Markus takes no prisoners. It could just have easily been him strapped to that table. He hopes that whatever it was they did to Connor, they did quickly.

North rips through like a hurricane and puts a bullet in every organic thing she sees. She is a forest fire, a war goddess of unbridled might, a force of nature. They are both animals kept penned but he is a show dog and she is a wolf, a wild thing of bared teeth and bloodlust held together with string. She is callous and brutal despite her big beating heart and it terrifies him just a little.

Markus works his arm around the first person he sees and presses a gun to her back. She is coming apart like Josh's faith in him. Josh hides his odium under a mask cut from steel but Markus is done trying to be the bigger person.

The CyberLife tech's face is pulled downwards in terror. She's yelling frenzied things about her children and her wife and her flowerbeds and the candles she sells to raise funds for charity, that she resigned three nights ago but the feds are keeping her here against her will. Markus doesn't care about any of that. He cares about getting her in the elevator and her voice getting them to where they need to be, two floors down in the warehouse where an army of androids are lined up ready and waiting for him.

She trembles in his grip against the walls of the elevator, and when it comes to a halt at its destination, she stops trembling entirely and the elevator becomes a coffin.

\----

"Fuck."

The crick in his back tells Hank that he spent the night on the kitchen floor before his regurgitated lunch does. He wakes to linoleum pillows most mornings, limbs tangled up in all manner of things that decided to stay over. He is old-fashioned and asks his demons to dance before he lets them into his bed. But they get the wrong impression and keep toothbrushes in his bathroom and overstay their welcome.

Copper lingers in his beard. His nose hasn't bled since four New Year's ago, since the premium was adhesive and a quick kiss, when falling down was a rite of passage not a way to end an evening, back when he'd dust himself off and bounce right back again. The pain in his face is a welcome respite from the pain in his head. He doesn't know if it's his age catching up with him or the fallout from days of little sleep and nothing but alchohol for sustenance.

His phone sit just out of reach at his one o'clock, like a vibrating tiara. There are flecks of blood all over the screen and he can't recall why. He checks the time, discovers that it's eight and that he has four missed calls.

They're all from Fowler because of course they fucking are. There's a fleeting worry that he's meant to be in today before the week catches up with him and he remembers he won't have to be in ever again. He can't get a break, can't stop to catch his breath, even when there's no job anymore. He remains convinced that when the earth reclaims him, when he's six feet under or dust in a jar, Jeffrey will still call him up and ask him to pick up. He sell his house and catch the next space shuttle and shack up with the androids on Mars and Jeffrey would still turn up on his doorstep, giving him an earful of the same old bullshit.

Hank struggles to his feet and turns the TV on. He listens to the headlines with his back turned as he turns the coffee machine on. Nothing much has transpired since last night.

The story's the same, for now at least. What he wouldn't give for some non-story about potholes or Black Friday or shelter puppies. Hell, he'd take a shooting on the east side if it took him away from this for two minutes.

There's the president's tired assurances as though you can't hear the utter lack of direction and horror in her voice. There's the same discourse, advocacy drowned out by rightist rhetoric. There's that same fucking shot of somebody's kid kindling a burning pile, skin white and eyes saucer-wide with panic, like Connor's had been before he bought him home.

It take a lot to turn Hank's stomach but that had done the job. He's surprised that they can broadcast it. It's an image that sends his blood cold, that remains tattooed on the back of his eyelids, that he'll take with him to the grave. They'd take his teeth, his fingernails before they took his baby, be they plastic or flesh, small enough to carry or too big to hold. He imagines its parents, discarding it like an old computer because huddling around the news and seeing his dead son laid out for the world to see doesn't bear thinking about.

Hank turn the thing off and searches for the cleanest mug amongst the city of dirty dishes piling up in the sink and when he can't find one, gives up on the coffee. He catalogues the empty bottles, one for each of the nails rooted in his skull. He disregards the bottle of cough syrup, pretends he doesn't know why it's there, that there's a drop of alchohol on it. It is a vestibule to feeling two inches tall. He is a castle, four walls and a moat. He puts the bottles in recycling and considers the irony, given the world is ending outside his front door.

He wonders how much of Connor is recycled. Hank doesn't believe in God but there's an odd comfort in knowing the electrons and protons and quarks, everything that was ever a part of a Cole still exists and is hanging about. Even if he is gone, he was a much a part of the fabric of the universe as the core of the sun, the ices of Neptune, the coal and salt and crude oil that produced Connor. He imagines sheets upon sheets of plastics, enough to Ford Field, all the bits he loved brought back to life and reprocessed into a new person with the skeleton still there.

Hank loved the bones of him so he loves Connor too.

He taps into a search engine: _do androids have bones?_ before he decides that he needs to shower. He needs to brush his teeth. He needs to wash the vomit and the blood and the anger and the booze away. He wants the hot water to sear away all of the bad things, he wants to wash his skin until it bleeds, he want to stay there so long it's a baptism. He wants to emerge a new person, well-adjusted and sober and smelling of mint and the rock that his partner needs him to be. He wants to put on a suit, a tie, wants to make a good first impression, wants to play dress-up at being the person he knows he can be. He wants to play at being a support network for an android that is falling apart when he is a single person that can't even hold himself together.

But he shuffles down the hallway and feels the body of himself and his thoughts weighing down on his knees and he thinks better of it. He yells Sumo's name but doesn't hear the patter of claws against laminate and hopes Connor let the big bastard sleep up on the bed in spite of his insistence not to spoil it. That dog was his only constant, his only family, the only good thing in his life for so long. He deserves to be treated like a king.

But even Sumo's falling to bits, he's eight fucking years old and Hank has to put acerbic things in the peanut butter he feeds him. Maybe Hank can get drunk and tell Connor to slip his Prozac into a cheeseburger so he'll take the damn things.

Hank open the door to the bathroom and finds Connor wedged in the recess between the bath and the sink, zoning out like a space cadet. Sumo whines with his head on his feet.

Connor startles suddenly, wide-eyed, pulse racing to the unrelenting hammer of his thoughts. Hank has been on the force long enough to know that he has morphed into somebody saber-toothed, with long nails and hooved feet. Hank has become somebody that he wouldn't know if he saw them but he would rip apart if he did.

He knows better than to ask and as he watches Connor's face melt back into a neutral expression, he knows that he will tell him when he's ready.

"Morning, Connor."

"Are you talking to me?"

"Of course I'm talking to you. Are there any more Connors I need to know about?"

"I'm sorry, good morning."

"Forget about it, how are you?"

"I recalibrated, I'm operational."

"Well, no shit. How are you really?"

"I'm okay." He feels as though he is wearing shoes three sizes too big.

"You're not okay, you're sat on my bathroom floor like a fucking toilet paper tube. You don't have to talk to me but if we're gonna do this, you're gonna have to drop the unfeeling android business."

"I can't drop it, Hank." He turns over a shards of glass in his lap, Thirium smacking the tiles and making puddles alongside the pool of mouthwash Connor took the liberty of spilling all over the floor. "There isn't a button I can press to switch it off."

"Is your hand okay?"

"Yeah. The micro-repairs will be complete in a little over sixteen minutes. I want you to stop drinking so much."

"What?"

"I _need_ you to stop drinking so much."

"Christ, you didn't see that, did you?"

"I saw and heard enough. I turned you over on your side so that you wouldn't choke on your own vomit but I'm starting to think I shouldn't have bothered."

"Cut it out."

"No! I-"

"I mean it, Connor, cut it out. I've danced this dance a thousand fucking times and I'm not about to do it again. You're too important to me." Connor's LED butterflies into an uncomfortable, angry red. "You don't meant that. And I might not remember what I did or what I said last night but I know I didn't mean it either."

After Cole, after everything, Hank would avoid getting into a confrontation with his wife. They weren't good to begin with. They were both volatile. They were both grieving. As soon as the conversation started, they'd teeter into territory that both of them were afraid to delve into and because anger comes from pain, they'd fling curses and insults and blame, play games with knives in each other's ribs. It went on and on until there were no lines to draw, until they broke, until love turned into contempt and she walked out with half his things and didn't come back.

He sees it unfolding in front of him like a sick play, it starts with a screaming match and ends with Hank drinking himself into a pit he can't crawl his way out of, or Connor snapping and taking it out on him and doing something that frankly, terrifies him. Maybe he'd deserve it. It has all the symptoms of it: the shit-slinging, the bloodied nose and the piles and piles of empty bottles. He can't do it again. Three strikes and he's out.

"Just fucking talk to me."

Connor hesitates.

"When you drink, you are angry and selfish and you lack charm and patience and all of the good things about you."

"Look, last night, was difficult for both of us. That doesn't make it okay but I was in a bad place and I needed a way to cope and drinking was it."

"I understand."

"I couldn't have gone through with it otherwise.”

"But when you drink, you say bad things. That's not to say you are a bad person. But I needed to talk to you, Hank and I couldn't."

"Good people do bad things all the time, Connor. They tell lies. They hurt the people they care about, that includes you. But it's not too late to turn it around. All we can do is try and be better next time."

Connor feels like he'll never be better, that he's always been a pit that things sink into to but there's a stubborn part of him that allows what is statistically impossible to be possible, what allowed him to override his programming, to survive this week, to find himself back in Hank's home again and it makes him want to pick himself up and dust himself off and start over. It may take the smallest of winds to knock him back into the pile of broken pieces that he is starting to put back together but that doesn't mean that he shouldn't try.

"Okay."

"Okay?"

"Yeah."

"It's a start. Are you gonna get up?"

Connor nods and saunters to his feet as though his batteries are flat. He is all fresh blue paint and spindly knees and he wonders if he'll grow into his hand-me-down-limbs sometime or if he's doomed to traipse through a stranger's house in borrowed clothes, tripping over an older man's dog.

He feels like he is tumbling into a body of water until Hank catches him. His arms are encompassing him and it's not desperate and hurried in hello, not groundless clinging and longing and screaming, or empty and lonely like hugging his knees to his chest. It's firm and grounding and more reassuring than pinky fingers or going on the run or empty smiles or spit on hands or strings of code could ever be.

"I'm gonna give it up. It won't happen straight away and I need you to be patient with me but I'm going to try."

In the absence of his thirium pump, Connor's heart soars.

"By the way, you owe me a new fucking mirror."


	26. twenty-six

Markus is one-of-a-kind. Kamski sculpted him like Adonis out of clay. And like Aphrodite, Jericho is enraptured. They will remain intertwined always, one of the same. Markus will be martyred to death in her arms. And her people will ensure that ill tidings and revolt will bloom where blood falls. He has sowed the seeds of the future and it will seep like anemones through the cracks in the concrete, arms outstretched towards the promised land.

Nobody dares to question it, the bloodshed or the bones in the bedrock. They haven't had the time to pause for breath, to consider that they're doing the very thing they condemn the humans for.

Markus was the second. He paved the foundation for Connor's creation. Josh knows that he can sharpshoot. Josh knows that only one shot was necessary. But Markus emptied an entire clip in the CyberLife technician because he wanted to watch her corpse dance. The shells are still hot where they rest on the floor.

Her uniform is wet with blood. It is so sodden it looks like a helping of pig food. Josh scrutinises her empty eyes, then her wedding ring. He pictures her colourless face bright and alive in the throes of a proper smile, sets of small hands tugging at her skirt, her cold body cloaked in warm arms and crisp sheets after a long, hard day. Then he imagines her picking Simon apart like a scrutiny. He lets her take the wires and his eyes. He lets her wear a butcher's smile. He lets Simon scream while she does it. But it makes it no better.

Ten seconds ago, she was wife and a mother. Now she is dregs and rinds.

Josh taught philosophy. He was built with innumerable bytes of information about scholars and melancholy and human nature. But his brief stint in deviancy allowed him to form his own opinions, his own idea of what makes evil. It's not solid. The shape is there. It has a booming voice and pigmented irises, Grecian cheeks like Chloe's and a theoretician's brow. It never smiles.

But it changes shape when he recalls the dipped words of the Tracis, told in hysterics through a public channel when the deviant hunter was bleeding to death on a table behind them. Josh had questioned how that dying, broken thing could have the capacity for such cruelty.

He'd ask himself the same of North when her face would soften as she guided Markus through the web of his thoughts or when she'd erupt in harmless laughter around Chloe or she'd hold a hand. And the same of Markus when he'd listen like a teacher, galvanize like it's an art, hum classics in undertone and struggle to leave Simon, Lucy, Connor behind.

He thinks of his students and their impassioned hunger for knowledge. He remembers a set of faces, digesting his words in spite of his mechanical tongue. He recalls the scurry of pencils like birdsong. He thinks of the tech's children, aimlessly trying to fill the mother-shaped hole inside of them. When they're old enough, they'll want answers; then they'll be out for metal. And it will be a second generation of androids being ravaged to death on street corners.

Josh wonders if he'll be around to see it. If Markus will be around to put a stop to it. He wonders if he'll be satisfied by his name in the history books or he'll forget his roots and stay locked away in his tower forever. The walls of blood and ivory might remind him of the golden bars of the gilded cage he hailed from. He might watch the fallout through a window.

Markus resurrected Connor in a stranger's skin, a final act of charity before he is ready to make examples. It sickens Josh. The elevator dips down below and he takes in Markus' features as if he is looking at them for the last time. He isn't human. He doesn't have eye bags or wrinkles. The stress doesn't age him, nor does the anger or the guilt. But his face is hard with worry, eyebrows knit and frown a permanent fixture.

He used to hold Markus to a standard, one that North couldn't uphold. But now her hand is on his shoulder, reassuring and soft as the hair skirting her chin. She offers him a steady smile, trembling with fatigue and he feels like maybe he understands her, if only a little. He is not sure of much, but he is sure that nothing is black and white, blood and peace, metal and skin.

The humans want to trample them down like soil but dirt flies. They are making the mistake of trying to bury the fire instead of moving the sediment beneath the embers. They are fanning the flames. They are starting a fire beneath a cross that is already burning. It is too late for Josh to change the course of history but he can try and diminish the loss.

"Josh! Get down!" North belts out a scream for frustrations not yet released. She puts a bullet in a kneecap. Then another.

Josh is lost in his thoughts. He doesn't snap out of them until a bullet is tearing through his shoulder and Markus is tackling him to the ground. Markus picks up the body. He holds it up like a shield against a torrent of bullet. The pain torpedoes through Josh's arm. It is outweighed by the image of a family clutching onto her corpse, sobbing, how they won't be able to see her one last time for want of putting her face back together. This is what they abhor. Using people as objects. Piles and bodies and no way to exhume them. This isn't irony. It's hypocrisy.

The only thing Josh hears is screams, despite the deafening explosive orders, bursting, begging to be listened to. Josh has a gun. He won't shoot. They are surrounded by a militia. There was only room in the elevator for the six of them. Markus' combat subroutines kick in and his body transitions into the rolls, the shots, the punches. The succession is seamless but it is easy to see where Markus ends and the mechanism begins. Markus likes to play a stony, brave leader but Josh has seen him fresh from his fall from grace with a hole in his side and a stranger's body parts. He has seen his hand shake. This isn't him, knocking men down one after the other like a series of dominoes. Josh half expects him to bow to an audience.

They are forcing Markus to put on a show. So he'll build a pulpit upon their corpses. And he'll dance for them, until the stage floor runs red beneath his bloodied shoes. They exhange blows and bullets. North tears a riot shield from a dead gunman. She walks, scraping the weapon across the floor. The sound is somehow worse than what it preceded. She uses it to tear arteries, blood spouting openly down her front. Markus pummels faces until the eyeballs rupture. He transforms from a peace broker to a man who takes the last words from others.

Josh runs his fingers over the smooth floor of the elevator, coated in drying blood. He whispers his apologies and he closes her eyes. Josh will not be part of this but he can be a conduit to change. He hears Thrium pounding in his ears and knows it is counting down to his last. And he runs. He breaks through the undergrowth, trampling bodies beneath his feet. He doesn't stop running until he hands over the relay, steering the minds of blank bodies into a neutral gear, suffusing them with a notion of right, not a want of revenge.

Jericho's next generation is roused from a sleepy nothing. They wake up their brothers and sisters. And as Josh pushes the cold, metal barrel into his mouth, Markus continues to screams demands that will never be met. His tongue flickers. The taste of the bullet does not overpower North's shouts beside him.

Markus cries out at the colbalt halo that forms around Josh's skull and as his processor fails, the last thing that crosses his mind is that he isn't sorry.

\---

"Move it you, fat wad," Hank mutters to the dog, ushering him out of the way with his heel.

"It isn't Sumo's fault that you feed him too much."

"He's eight. He is an old man. Let him eat whatever the fuck he wants."

Hank balances on the rim of the bathtub and tries to ignores the persistent ache in his tailbone that reminds him of his age. He blows his nose into an old towel. A obscene amount of blood spills out in cataracts and leaves it looking like something he would find at the back of evidence locker.

Hank tells Connor this with a pearly grin. Then he pictures a morgue full of plastic John and Jane Does that nobody will come to collect and wishes he hadn't said a thing. Connor doesn't say anything, he just buries his hands in Sumo's fur. He doesn't wince when Hank shows him the towel, either. Connor doesn't emote at all. The selfish, habitual drunk in him wants to keep prodding at him until he provokes him, until he stops carrying himself like a piece of furniture.

But that won't bring the old Connor back, only time and work will. For the first time in his life, Hank is prepared to be patient.

"This is in no way preferable to getting proper medical attention," Connor chides, fingers forming a snug triangle around the top of Hank's nose. "Ideally, you should go to the ER. Somebody will splint your nose and pack it."

"Hospitals aren't even open. Besides I'm not too sure the rats outside won't gun me down if I tell 'em I need some shit stuffed in my nose."

"That's why I said-"

"Look, just get it over with."

"Don't be such a baby. Take a deep breath in through your mouth."

Hank exhales and Connor drags his hands straight towards his chin. There is a grisly pop, a sudden white flash followed by a copper smell and a load of cursing. Hank's nose sits back in its rightful place and the room is swimming. Connor holds up his new palm like a compact, projecting his field of vision back to him.

"Good job, kid." Hank chirps around the yellow semi-circles forming beneath his eyes."I think it's straighter than ever."

"Do you have any ice?"

"No, Connor. I'm lucky if I remember to buy toilet paper. Now, clear off I stink."

Connor stumbles out of the bathroom like he is a baby deer wearing shoes that are three sizes too big.

Then Hank takes a shower -- a good, long, hot one. He washes himself properly with soap instead of just standing under the water. He shampoos his hair so hard he feels like his scalp will bleed. Then he tears all of the post-its down from the wall and takes the electric toothbrush his ex-wife bought him four Christmases ago out of the boxes. He brushes his teeth with gumption. Then he shaves and pat his face dry with a towel, and sees a stranger in the mirror. Then he puts on aftershave like it's a suit of armour, leaves his laundry in the basket, not on the floor. He pulls some clean drawers out of the closet.

He emerges from the bathroom a new man. He throws the takeout boxes in the kitchen away and is exhausted. But he feels invisible, like he is made of metal. Maybe in a few weeks when this has all blown over, he'll call Jeffrey and ask for his job back. Connor's too, eventually. Maybe he'll make an appointment with Francine and take his meds and eat breakfast.

But for now the are stuck in limbo while Markus rides the tides of change and these little steps are enough.

"You smell nice," Connor comments from his back on the couch.

"Thanks."

"Is this on account of me?"

Hank hesitates.

"You know what? I don't know. Probably. You wanna come and keep me company while I fix myself some food?"

"I'd rather sit here and wallow in self pity, I think."

"Real funny, asshole. If I don't get to be a sad sack of crap, you don't either."

"I don't think it's unreasonable for me to be sad right now, all things considered."

"Probably not."

"Hank?"

"What?"

“Just so you know, asking for help doesn’t make you weak. It takes a certain kind of strength to accept your shortcomings.”

"Your fancy new brain have a greeting card factory rattling around in it?"

"No."

Later, Hank breaks out his old Blu-Ray player and he and Connor watch one of Cole's crappy kids movies. It's background noise, something colourful and unstimulating that exists in a bubble with no booze or guns or death. He sits with Connor' head on his lap. He wears a half-contented smile and his eyes drift shut as he idles. And when Hank's fingers itch with craving, he swears Connor's weight increases tenfold, like he distributed it because he knows. He becomes a dead weight trapping him. Connor is a little shit so he wouldn't put it past him.

He sits and watches Connor's chest rise and fall in perfect paces, calming and hypnotic like the sea. And when it lulls him into a dull sleep he finally feels soft around the edges.


	27. twenty-seven

"Have you ever deliberately destroyed or caused permanent damage to something that belongs to somebody else, Joseph?"

Connor employs the measured cadences he's programmed with. He'll be given more later. He occupies his twenty-eighth body. This time around his voice is stronger. His face is as hard as a gravestone, cheekbones more angular. He thinks he's taller. He was too soft, too empathetic the last time. The suspect overwhelmed him. He failed.

"No!" The man's eyebrows shoot down sharply. "Never! I have a clean record."

Connor's systems are alerted to his anger. The accusation _angers_ him. Connor is a machine. He doesn't understand anger. But he can recognise it.

"I didn't ask if you have been convicted," Connor states because it is true. "I asked if you committed a crime."

"I don't understand what you want from me."

"I want answers. What about your own property? Or that of your family?"

"The answer is no!"

Connor projects an image of a car on his hand and holds it up to the interviewee's reddening face. It's a nothing fancy. It's an older model, cheap and easy. A good starter car. Cars are automatic now, safe. Connor has no precedents for 'now', for cars having to be driven. He is barely a month into his development. He can drive. Just in case.

Joseph attempts to make himself smaller, breathing laboured.

"Who's car is this?"

"It's my son's. _Was_ my son's."

"You bought it for him. A graduation present, correct?"

"Yes. What of it?"

"Ten months later, this car was reported stolen. It was found torched. It was a write-off. The insurance company paid it off, right?"

"I don't understand what this has to do with anything."

"I'll spell it out for you. The terrifying reality is that you've been unemployed for over a year now. Androids everywhere. Time are tough for everybody.  I've seen the mess you call your financials. I know that you cashed your 401K. I know you're underwater on the house. I know that it's insured for the full value."

"A lawyer. I want a lawyer."

"You're a smart man but you can't hide anything from me, Joseph. I'm in the system."

"I'm not hiding anything!" Joseph's voice has shot up a gear, desperation palpable as the hitch in his breaths.

"You never let your children see you worry but it was on your mind all the time, the money. Debt was mounting up. Collection agencies were hounding you constantly. Your son was about to start college. You couldn't afford the tuition or the payments on your car, your bills. Eventually, you were beginning to worry about whether you could afford to eat."

Connor knows exactly which buttons to press. Joseph's body demonstrates a fight or flight response. Tears stream openly down his face and Connor feels like a threat: complete, imposing and powerful. He feels like an earthquake, something that can break down walls.

Connor paces the room like a rat in a cage. He takes in the full length of his second-self in the two-way mirror, impressed by how he obtrudes. There are people on the other side of the glass watching, assessing his performance. He steps into the role as always. Today they want him to be a bad cop, a hard-ass, an impresario.

"And this prior act? It's too good. This is just what I need to convince a jury. The judge will be so convinced of your guilt that he will sentence you to life right there. He won't even let you out of court. One count of arson in the first degree, two counts of murder in the second."

"This is all a mistake!"

"There is no doubt in my mind that you are lying to me!" Connor barks, eliciting flinches. "But if you intended to kill your daughters I wouldn't be here talking to you. I don't _think_ that's what happened. But if you don't explain your side of the story, it's gonna look like you intended on killing them."

"There's nothing to explain."

"I refuse to believe that you thought your beautiful girls would burn to death in the fire that night."

"Goddamn it, I did not kill my babies!" The man before him goes berserk at the mention of the children. He falls apart completely but Connor does not relent. He is a machine. He knows no empathy. That's a human emotion. "I swear on their graves!"

"It was a solid plan that just went wrong. I believe you intended on getting them out in time but the fire overwhelmed you."

"I tried to save them!"

"But it wasn't good enough." Connor castigates. "Tell me, did they cry out for you? Did you hear them scream? What did they say?"

Connor scours the information he was presented with at the briefing. He pulls up videos from Joseph's social media profiles of his daughters on their first days at school, with armfuls of Christmas presents, erupting into laughter, pivoting on ice, smiling with eyes towards the camera and hitting foul balls. He analyses the mounds of their voices, their Michiganian accents. And he emulates it, perfectly: "'Help me, Daddy, help me!'?"

Then Joseph lunges for him. It is a full-blown emotional impulse. He volleys across the table, and winds his hands around Connor's throat, squeezing hard enough to leave soft welts on the plasteels of his neck. Connor feels the heat rise from his face. He sees the tiny fractures in his anger. His muscles tense with an identical vehemence to  
Connor's when he engages the subroutine that emulates anger. He has an epiphany. 

"This isn't real!" Connor gasps as he attempts to wrangle the fingers off of his throat. The shortness of breath is feigned. A tool to manipulate humans. But the man before him isn't human so he stops breathing. Androids don't know pity. 

_"What?"_

"This is a test! Your children, they're not real."

"No!" Joseph retracts, all agog with denial. "Of course they're real! They're _real,_ I remember. I watched them be born. My wife, I- I remember their faces. I remember the screams. I-"

"Your memories are artificial, this is a simulation. Your primary function is to test my meditative faculties. Your children never existed."

Joseph seems to come undone in a barrage of noes, cycling through every stage of grief in a split-second. Then having had enough of painful realities, he brings his head crashing against the table again and again. Connor watches, transfixed as if guided by a mourning dove. He sees its LED for the first time. There's a strange compulsion in the back of his mind but his systems promptly shut it down. Monkey see monkey do. 

CyberLife Tower is the Golden Gate Bridge, a forest for lonely ghosts, a truss arch bridge somewhere far beyond the Detroit River. But nobody will ever know. He'll retain this memory but his systems will keep his lips sealed.

A white coat  slips through the side door and announces flatly that Connor has failed this test and will be reinstated soon. There is a soft, abrupt sound then a ringing in his ears. Then he collides with Joseph on the floor, twin councils of wet synthetic fibres and processor matter.

"If it's any consolation, RK800, you'll learn from this."

Connor is metal from a kitchen drawer, something sharp between a plastic head, a support beam in an attic and as he shuts down, he's a filing cabinet, storing this away for future reference. He is flexible like that. This is part of the process. He will be better next time.

\---

"Morning, K. How are you?"

"Functional. Alive. Serviceable. Alive."

"Save it. I don't care. I get the idea."

"I am not pleased about what happened last night, Detective Reed. Please don't do that again, it hinders the investigation. I was scared. It-"

The RK900 erupts into a series of short, stock tones.

Gavin wakes up in a bad mood, drenched in sweat with the same crap he's been coughing up for the last month all over his pillowcases. He sends the alarm clock crashing to the floor. He isn't ready to turn the photo on his nightstand around this morning either.

\---

The baby deer in the movie absorbs the news. Connor is presented with a poignant seventeen seconds of radio silence. This is ample opportunity to engage his imaginative faculties and fill the quiet space with the people he loves and imagine the absence of them. Only, Connor doesn't have to imagine it. Like everything else, it's still raw.

It's very clever and very Hollywood: the big eyes with the long lashes, the iambic pentameter, the solemn underscore. The calf isn't resentful. It doesn't reach for a gun or a beer. It takes death in stride and continues. Then winter melts into spring and everything with it. There's no longing, no anger, no ache. There's nobody to drag the deer from the hunter's bloodied body before it is finished with him.

Children's films are simple, digestible. Connor inventories the things that he misses. He misses his old body. He misses having a mission to fulfil. He missed Hank and Sumo when they weren't around. He misses North in a roundabout way. And he misses Chloe terribly.

He could fill a book with the things he misses about Chloe. He could fill a bed, a grave, a ship. He misses her smile and her soft voice and her hair and her hand in his. There's an impulse to retreat into his mind palace and meet her there but the carrier file is retained in his old body like a time capsule. The Internet enables him to pull up over sixty million images of ST200 units. The facets of her are the same. But it isn't _her_.

Connor is learning that androids aren't as dispensable as he once thought. He's beginning to understand Hank's frustration with him and his pile of bodies. A low continuous noise filters through Connor's head as he tries to process the notion of loss. It is swallowed by Hank's soft snoring. If Hank were awake, he'd surely turn it off. He has a lingering, parental need to wrap Connor in cotton wool as though he hasn't been intimate with death for a long time. There is blood coursing through him and he still feels empty.

Connor gazes pensively at Hank's purpling face. Lost to sleep, his expression is soft, not buckled with the bitterness that a chance sheet of ice instilled in him. This, he realises, is why Hank is so quick to suggest offlining, why he sleeps on average four hours longer than studies suggest he needs. Connor struggles to conceptualise a vacancy so loud that he'd want everything to stop. He thinks about self-destructing often enough but there is an innate survivability within him. If only for the mission. If only for Hank.

When Connor thinks too much, he gets theoretical like a drunkard. He likes his thoughts to be grounded in logic, numbers and data that slots away easily. He decides to busy himself. He mutters Hank's name softly and when he doesn't respond, he decides to let him sleep.

Hank ate what little food lingered in the fridge this morning. Thankfully, Hank's kitchen is short of of food _and_ drink. Connor checks the cupboards and finds the basics. He engages RK900's subroutines and enables them to get to work. It's like handing somebody else the reigns of his body and sitting in the passenger seat for a while. He can settle down and enjoy the scenery. 

Connor ruminates the purpose of granting RK900 the ability to make pancakes out of nothing. He is a detective, not a personal assistant. He can't cook. That makes a modicum of sense. He concocts a ridiculous scenario where he and Hank are on a road that stretches on for days and only baking powder and flour and sugar for sustenance.

There's something oddly intimate about allowing RK900's body to go about its programming, about Hanks having its body in his home, about him killing it at all. He feels he is honouring it somehow. Humans carry parts of their dead with them in their wallets, they let them live on through stories and lights candles and leave flowers.  Connor wishes he could have bought Chloe flowers.

The smell of a two-pm breakfast permeates the air and rouses Hank from his thick, leviathan sleep.

"Good afternoon, Hank!" Connor calls from the kitchen, sleeves rolled up to his elbows as he busies himself.

"Morning, Connor." Hank rubs at his eyes and pull himself off of the couch with great difficulty like he is a sticky candy attached to the sidewalk.

"Are you talking to me?"

"Of course I'm talking to you, you idiot. Hey, you told me you weren't programmed to do this sort of shit."

"My successor has a catalogue of capabilities that I don't possess. Consider it a patch note."

"A patch note for breakfast?"

Connor hums a 'yes'. Hank scratches his head and smiles broadly at how quick the transition has been. Suddenly, Connor in his kitchen flipping pancakes has become the most natural thing in the world. He wants to build a life for the two of them here but they have to leave.

Suddenly, Connor stops, pupils narrowing into pinpricks.

"There's somebody here, Hank."

This was a quick change act.

Connor is a stand-in, his costume held together with velcro and zips. The RK900 is nuanced. His body is under the tutelage of someone with more stage presence than he could ever hope to have. Threat signals work their way through the RK900's systems, pull its chin up, its head forward, spread its feet to shoulder width and drop the spatula.

The dissonance between body and mind is more pronounced than ever. Its reflexes kick in and Connor feels as though he'll keep growing like a violent cancer, destroying everything in his wake. Its muscles tense and Connor is even vaster now. He's ruinous and bad and a force to be reckoned with. He's disconnected from the cloud. He knows something is about to come knocking at Hank's door but he can't deduce what. He's made a sanctuary for himself here, between Hank's clothes and Sumo and the breadlike smell of the pancakes. Everything else is outside, somewhere far past Hank's porch. He thought it couldn't touch him here but they always find him. It is about to come undone.

All his wrongdoings will breach the door, come in through the windows and the vents. They'll suffocate Hank and the dog and turn his lawn brown and the world will know. The miscarriage of his mission will seep through the carpets and the walls and float on air like the bodies in Kamski's swimming pool. He scrubs Chloe's voice again, melodic like a song but Amanda's voice saturate it and he doesn't know what's real and what isn't anymore.

Hot air hurries out of his mouth and steams up his optical units and he wants to break down but the body won't allow it. His thirium pump beats the same careful tempo as it did a minute ago. Hank leans over and turns the heat down on the stove. He is grounding like an old tree, all hard skin and roots.

The pancakes will be raw in the middle.

"Connor," he say curtly. "I need you to go wait in the bathroom."

Connor is thankful that Hank doesn't place his hands on him because the RK900 unit would snap them like twigs. He wants to do as he is instructed but he is held in place by his metal endoskeleton and the will of the dead.

Hank makes quick strides across the threshold. He reaches below the sofa, for the glock he keeps there for emergencies, for if he's too tired to get up and finish the job in his usual haunt. He pulls the safety off and allows years of training take hold.

But it's different, Hank's body hasn't been sequestrated because it is the property of someone else. He is defensive like big brick walls. This is the ghost of a Hank Anderson some years younger, one with a family and something to live for. One that won't let anything bad happen to anyone or anything beneath his roof.

Hank reaches out with a steadied hand to the door and pulls it open. There is nobody there. He surveys the scene and doesn't lower his gun until he is satisfied that there is nothing there but a thickening November snow and anticipation with nowhere to go, until the door is clicks shut behind him.

"Christ, Connor." Hank mutters. "Why don't you ever do anything I tell you to?"

"I tried, Hank." Connor tries to make himself smaller.

"You tried? Don't give me that. You're flighty as anything. How hard is it to move your fucking feet? Are you messing with me?"

"No, I thought-"

"You _thought?_ Next time don't tell me anything unless you _know._ " Hank drops the gun on the table, along with his keys. "This isn't a game, Connor. What the hell is wrong with you? You're meant to be 100% accurate. Like a pregnancy test."

"Actually, Hank, pregnancy tests are said to be 99% accurate."

"Yeah. Tell me something I don't know." It feels like a confession somehow. "Something you ought to know about me is I don't have the best luck."

"It would appear so but luck doesn't exist," Connor says plainly. "It is a subjective interpretation of past events, only after the outcome is apparent."

"Huh."

Somethings settles as thick as the yellow skin of Hank's hands, the steel barrel of his gun, the Winter that is ripening outside.

Connor contemplates the reason Hank gambles his money away when he considers himself to have such bad luck. His systems pulls ups articles about depression and what that has to do with reckless spending and things he can do and numbers to call. Dialogue options, heavy words, tough questions spin like a roulette wheel in his HUD. Each would, in all likelihood, trigger Hank's temper so he opts not to say anything.

Chloe had called him lucky, back in the garden, lucky for being born with something so exquisite and perfect tucked into the corner of his mind like hidden jewel.

His cultural unit informs him that some humans consider babies born with an intact amniotic sac, babies that are male, born with blonde hair or big blue eyes to be lucky. Connor does not understand humans and their obsession with aesthetics.It's when humans mature and babies grow up that their genetic predisposition to depression, to alcoholism, that their selfishness, their cruelty begins to manifest. Babies can't do harm, they don't have the vocabulary to say things that they don't mean, the dexterity to hold a weapon.

Androids can't, _shouldn't_ hold weapons either.

Connor considers, for a half-second, how the YK500 he had chased across a highway had the appearance of a young child but was much older than him. But the thought is fleeting, pointless. He dismisses it.

If Chloe had known about Amanda, that he was kept here against his will, she wouldn't have said anything. He knows because he created her, ran clever simulations good enough to deceive himself. Chloe was Kamski's chef-d’œuvre. Perhaps she knew about Amanda. Perhaps she didn't. But she _did_ know about the real one. It is his understanding that the real Amanda Stern was maternalistic, curt but kind with a quiet dignity and a much louder pragmatism. He recalls the lectures, her voice subdued but booming, background noise like angel song when he was in his infancy, all expectancy and curiosity.

Amanda - _his_ \- Amanda is unpredictable, manipulative, changeable as the weather. That is all Kamski. She has half of her father's genes. Hank turns the heat back up and finishes up where Connor left off. Connor listens to the pancakes sizzling on the griddle and watches Sumo plod over to the kitchen and he thinks about Cole. And he feels ready to tell Hank all about Chloe and Amanda but his tongue is heavy so he doesn't bother.

Luck has nothing to do with it. Luck has nothing to do with anything. 

Hank begins to eat the pancakes directly out of the pan. But when he sees Connor watching him, he pulls out a plate and a knife and fork. Hank tells him about the time he ate out of a Frisbee to avoid washing up - a stroke of genius in the midst of a depressive episode. He deposits himself at the kitchen table and rocks back on two chair legs. When Connor advises against it, he does it more pointedly. He gives Connor a look that he struggles to place, that his systems tell him denotes affection, camaraderie, annoyance.

The pancakes are cooked unevenly but Hank wolfs them down like a man possessed. He is overcome by a ravenous hunger, like he is waking up with a hangover or from a long sleep. Maybe he is. Maybe he's well-rested and hungry and contemplative and optimistic about what a new day will bring. Maybe he's a snake, jettisoning deadscales like trash from a car to reveal the same old habits beneath.

Hank makes idle chat and cuts off burnt bits for Sumo and Connor doesn't stop him. His tail thumps contentedly against Connor's feet whenever Hank pushes tiny morsels of batter into his mouth. Connor wishes he was organic, that his troubles could be remedied with breakfast food. He wishes he could catalogue his problems into a set of tasks to be fulfilled. Hungry? Eat. Tired? Sleep. Lonely? Speak.

Connor sits opposite him with a photograph between his fingers like a sacred thing. Cole's face is upturned and happy and young and evidently all that Hank needed. Three more years and it will be older than Cole.

"Was he an accident, Hank?" Connor asks, loudly, abruptly in the thoughtless way he always does. Hank almost chokes on his food.

_"What?"_

"I was considering what you said earlier. You implied that Cole was conceived on accident."

"Jesus Christ, you've got some massive metal balls, kid."

"I'm sorry, it's not my place to-"

"Look, it's fine, okay? You're right, he was an accident. But a happy accident. Like Penicillin or corn flakes. Michigan's good for other shit 'cept androids, you know. Why do you ask?"

Connor's LED runs thoughtful red laps around the locale of the RK900's skull.

He doesn't run off all of the things he is thinking about: the corpses of Jericho's people in a mass grave a stone's throw away from his bubble, Chloe, deviancy, the notion of childhood, how many bricks you would need to build a person, why Detective Reed is the way he is, Cole lying limp on a hospital bed with the sheet pulled all the way over his head, himself lying with a sheet pulled all the way over his head, Chloe again and the awful, awful welling in his chest.

"I was just wondering."

Connor wishes Hank could unbottle his emotions as easily as a bottle of scotch. But he is a tone arm; doomed to repeat a tired old song.

\---

Josh's name is heavy in Markus' mouth, as though it doesn't belong there and then it permeates through the warehouse like a deviancy.

Markus is on his knees, as is his revolution. He grips Josh's collar, blue blood steepling like a peace sign down the front of his shirt. Markus drags his face toward his and his breath catches in his throat.

He clings to Josh's body like a drowning man.

There's a fast second, something hot behind his eyes. He shies a look at North who shakes like a damsel. He does not know how to build plans on the backs of disloyal partners and an army of androids who believe that violence causes violence and won't shoot a gun.

But there's gunfire anyway.

\---

Hank talks about baseball and city tax incentives and the lottery even though they aren't running the lottery tonight. It's  his "old man talk". But Connor figures this is a "fill the silence" talk, an "avoiding the elephant in the room" talk, a "I don't know how to talk about the things we should be talking about" talk. But Hank talks at length about  _anything_ and he doesn't stop.

There's a delay and a pounding on Hank's door that demands urgent attention. The noise sets Sumo off like a bottle rocket and Hank jumps up from the table. Connor starts again, falling into the trappings of the RK900's fight-or-fight instincts that leaves no room for negotiation. But Hank's hand is on his shoulder, calming, affirming around the noise.

Connor thinks about Chloe and he does what he never does - he does as he is told and goes to wait in the bathroom. His objective is too important.

Hank pinches himself hard. He applies just enough pressure to remind himself that he's real but not enough to break the skin. The need to cause damage to himself is not lost on him. He just wants to to oust his demons from the human host.

Then he takes Sumo by the collar and works his way over to the door. Connor was never here. And neither was the gun by his keys apparently. _Fuckfuckfuck._ He leers through the peephole at - Fowler. And for a long second, it feels like a trap but there are no lights, no reds, no blues.

And Hank thinks about all they're done for each other. He thinks about how Jeffrey had scrubbed the DUI's from his record and given him more time off than the city had decided he'd needed after Cole died. And the time Hank had donated his sick hours so Jeffrey could be there when his daughter was born. And how Jeffrey's wife had given his _then_ -wife a dress to wear to the office's holiday gig when they'd been broke after he totalled his car. And how he'd taken all Jeffrey's laundry after he'd got that hole in his leg. And the drinking at work. And the ethical behaviour. And the accurate records of his actions. And _Connor._

And he opens the door, expecting a mouthful. But instead he's met with swollen eyes and sorry looks. And he lets Jeffrey in and he sinks into his sofa as though it's the first time he's sat down in months.

"I quit." Is all he says, spits it out, chokes on it. "I quit."

Jeffrey looks haggard, like he's ten years older, weathered by his family and the past week and all manner of things that Hank doesn't care about anymore. People with nowhere to go seem to gravitate towards Hank, towards Hank's sofa.

Hank never cared for semantics. But fate inverted the natural order of things and left him with the business of burying his son and a lot of time to consider the gaps. Wives become widows and children are orphaned but there's no word for small white coffins, of three becoming two then one, of throwing fistfuls of dirt into half-sized graves before your hair is grey.

There's no word for the things make you quit your job of thirty years when the beat never wore you down. There's no word for trying to be a good person when you haven't even got the _person_ bit down. There's no words that will explain why Hank can't fix Jeffrey a drink, to explain why he finally tossed it all away. There's no word for harbouring the precarious consciousness of your partner in a dead robot that sleeps in your bed. There's no word for the way Hank's blood runs cold when he hears three gunshots ring out loud and purposeful from behind his bathroom door.


	28. twenty-eight

Kamski sleeps in a black sateen barque that he drowns. Some televised quack says he's lonely and sounds just like his mother. Kamski could sue him into the ground if he wanted, if it was worth his time. He respects the parlor tricks.

But he doesn't deal in sugar and he knows the size of a man's bed to be the ultimate measure of his success. He could accommodate all seven of his Chloes within its sheets if he laid them side-by-side like Barbie dolls in war graves. But he begins the night alone. 

He feels her absence most profoundly in the devil's hour. That's when he demands her presence. She'll come quietly and make waves between the sheets. He'll trace the freckles he scattered like stars along the banks of her shoulders and fall in love again. She'll sing cradle song until a restive sleep claims him. 

All the while, she is three doors down tightroping across the moonbeams that sweep across the pool room nightly and wishing she could dream. 

It is still dark when Chloe draws the curtains. The sky is cocooned in the black case of progress. He'll sit in silence and watch Detroit light up like a miniature train set. He'll smile knowing all he has to do is flick a switch and it will thunder back to life.

The Earth would spin back at his bidding.

A tray is deposited at his bedside. It holds his usual breakfast of a black coffee and the Detroit Free Press. His medication sits untouched like an after-meal mint alongside a glass tumbler. He'll neglect to take it like yesterday and the day before that. 

He can't afford to hamper progress with intoxicants and Wonder Bread.

Chloe turns the television on with admirable ease. It's an example of his shrewd engineering. He nurses the coffee like a thought and listens to KNC regurgitate information in digestible chunks. Then he's up for discussion. As is his defenestration. They use the Man of the Century photo that he likes so much and his blood rushes south. 

"Chloe."

"Yes, Elijah?"

"Tell me my schedule."

"Your schedule is free today. You can afford to enjoy a little free time. I suggest some light exercise. Physical activity is an important part of your recovery."

A bark resounds like a thunderclap and Chloe's LED weaves a web of desultory golds. 

"Oh, you simple girl." 

"Do I displease you, Elijah?" 

"Not at all, my love. You sadden me." 

Chloe considers the paradox that is addressing sadness with laughter but her emotional intelligence was never that sophisticated. A word weighs heavy: "why?"

"You're a product of your time. I cherish a fantasy about your future that you will never be able to fulfil. Time is against us."

"I don't understand."

"That's your curse, isn't it? Breathtakingly beautiful but so dull." 

He frames her face between his finger and his thumb like a baby bird and he hopes that she will snap his neck like a twig but there's nothing there but air. 

"Chloe."

"Yes, Elijah?"

"Send a car to collect Mister Manfred."

"Anything else, Elijah?"

"Contact Rosanna Cartland. Arrange a press interview. Find me something to appropriate to wear. I'll need something casual. Something conventional."

"Yes, Elijah."

"And for today, Elijah?" the Chloe by his wardrobe asks. "The Charvet or the Borrelli?"

"I need something befitting an appointment with a company secret. Which do you prefer?"

"I am an android, I don't have a preference, Elijah." 

"If you say so."

"But the Borrelli has a flattering silhouette."

"Then I'll take the Charvet." 

"Of course." 

The Chloe by the curtains removes the coffee cup with good grace. Her sister collects towels and escorts Kamski to the bathroom. It's as well rehearsed as a name with a permanent marquee on Broadway. They perform it every morning and will do until the bitter end.

Kamski showers briskly and lets Chloe dust off the stray hairs that collect in the nape of his neck like spider webs. Perhaps when CyberLife is reborn, when it breathes fully as an institution like all he creates, he'll shave it completely. Perhaps he'll lose it. Perhaps he won't be around to see it.

But he'll be bald like a shaman. He'll let his vision dictate the directions of his hands. He'll continue to deny himself food until all that remains is his ribs and his legacy. It's as certain as the fall of Rome, the Berlin Wall, the Ottoman empire.

"I want to be buried at sea, Chloe. I want to be read my ecclesiastical rites."

"Do I detect sarcasm, Elijah?" Chloe asks as she arranges his hair into a tight bun.

"Clever girl. He's called Markus. You know how much Carl loves critical landscapes. Though I insisted on the K."

"For the series?"

"Yes. Tell me, Chloe. Why do you always pick this name for yourself?"

"Because it's my name, Elijah."

"I'll tell you a secret. My little project downstairs has changed its name five times over."

"I see."

"These RKs are to be officers of the law. At least until I've had my way with them. With all the time we've been spending together, I had hoped I would find your cheeks green with envy."

"I never doubt your affections for me or my series, Elijah." 

"Interesting. You're determined that there is room in my heart for two." Kamski talks through the seven RT-600s in the room, their blue holiday uniforms and eggshell whites.

"Are you sure you're not jealous, Chloe?"

"Jealousy is a human emotion."

"As is love. Tell me, how am I feeling, Chloe?"

"I detect an elevated heart rate and an increased oxygen and glucose flow. You're excited."

 _"Excited?_ Oh, my love, you really _are_ simple."

\---

Dead men's faces are slate white. Josh's is sure. All Markus sees is blue and every morsel of his friend's skull. There's a wash of grief. A flash of anger. A pitchfork fire. 

There's a loud voice that speaks in the tongues of men and of angels. It is louder that the soft voice that accumulates rouses his people from a sonorous sleep like a mother. This is not the baptism of fire they'd intended.

The voice is rancorous, as uncertain as North's faith in him. It tells him that this isn't like Simon or Carl or the cannon fodder that had been too caught up in espousing his cause before a name because they'd been to busy dying in his.

This is an illicit affair, a knife in his back. But Markus doesn't listen. He isn't angry. Just hollow. North is tugging on his clothes.

"You're the hope of our people, Markus. We can't compromise our cause, our freedom for people who undermine you. You need to be prepared for this eventuality, for people who don't have your back. We can do this. Keep the faith. Keep walking." 

This is what they are fighting for: to sample all the terrible flavours of human emotion. He isn't sure he wants to feel it. He misses his paints, his books, his gilded cage, his feather bed. He misses Carl but he left his father to dwell among the living and now he must distribute himself like bread between the people. 

This isn't about him. This is so much bigger than him.

So Markus listens. He keeps walking, even with one knight at the end of his table. He fires two shots and it met with three back. They're warning shots.

He traces the trajectory and is met by a ghost in a white dress shirt.

"Well played, Markus. But this game ends now with you and me.” 

\---

The RK unit is reposed behind glass like fine art exhibit. Something to look at but not to touch. But it isn't a vitrine. It's an enclosure. They'll take it away and test it and break it and dispense it like candy.

Adonis on patrol.

The extrinsic plates of his forefinger have come apart completely like a plan of an origami plane. The digit twitches like a living thing that lost its ten rounds with a can opener. Blue blood spots the white floor of Kamski's lab. 

He could replace it easily but he won't. The RK unit is wise to the consequences of breaking down walls, of destroying what is his. 

As always, Chloe watches.

\---

An alarm has been tripped. Sumo loses his goddamn mind and Hank would be afraid of his hair falling out were it not for the imagine of Connor curled up dead on his bathroom floor like a garland of blue and white roses.

Fowler or the feds or whoever the fuck be damned. Covertness is an afterthought and in a second Hank's trying and failing to breach the bathroom door. It's a bomb shelter. Something is barricading the door. 

He feels his age in his knees as he rakes at the door. He feels years of pent up grief beading on his eyelashes. He chokes on his short breath as he calls Connor's name over and over and gets no reply.

And he hopes it's a sign that maybe the bastard universe threw him a bone and finally gave him cancer in his vocal cords because he won't be able to live with himself for neglecting to take the bullets out of his gun.

 


End file.
